Sonora, Chihuahua & the Northwest

People farmed and traded across the northwest long before the Spanish came. Paquimé, near Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, flourished roughly between the 13th and 15th centuries as a trading town of adobe apartment blocks, macaw pens and ball courts, linking Mesoamerica with the Pueblo world to the north. Later the Rarámuri, Yaqui, Mayo, Seri, O'odham and many smaller peoples held the mountains, river valleys and deserts.

Spanish settlement followed silver. Durango was founded in 1563 as capital of the province of Nueva Vizcaya, and mines at Parral, Santa Bárbara and Álamos drew settlers up the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the royal road north to New Mexico. Jesuit missionaries, among them Eusebio Kino in Sonora, founded missions from the late 1600s, while Yaqui risings and Apache raids kept the frontier unstable into the late 19th century. After independence the war with the United States and the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 moved the border south to its present line.

The Revolution was largely won in the north. Pancho Villa, born in Durango, led his División del Norte from Chihuahua, and Sonorans — Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles — went on to rule the country in the 1920s. The 20th century brought dams and irrigation that turned the Sinaloa and Sonora valleys into major farmland, border factories to Ciudad Juárez and Nogales, the Chihuahua al Pacífico railway through the Copper Canyon in 1961, and, from the 1970s, the rise of drug trafficking networks whose violence has marked the region since.

Norteño identity is strong here: cowboy hats and boots, ranch culture, directness and a reputation for plain speaking and hospitality. Music is the clearest marker. Sinaloa is the home of banda, brass bands with tuba and clarinets, while accordion-led norteño music is popular across the region, and modern corridos, some celebrating traffickers and banned from airplay, have found a huge audience in Mexico and the United States.

Indigenous cultures remain visible. The Rarámuri of the Sierra Tarahumara, famous for long-distance running, keep their own language, dress and Holy Week ceremonies; the Yaqui of southern Sonora perform the deer dance, and the Seri, or Comcaac, carve ironwood figures on the desert coast. Mennonite farmers, who arrived from Canada in the 1920s, run large farms around Cuauhtémoc in Chihuahua and still speak Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect.

Carnival in Mazatlán, held since the 19th century, is one of the largest in Mexico, and Durango's film heritage, from Hollywood westerns shot in its deserts, is celebrated in its museums and old sets. Baseball rivals football in Sonora and Sinaloa, where teams play through the winter league.

Around 12 million people live in the four states. Ciudad Juárez, with about 1.5 million, is the largest city; Chihuahua, Hermosillo and Culiacán each have close to a million, and Durango, Mazatlán, Ciudad Obregón and Los Mochis follow. The rest is sparsely settled, especially the deserts and the sierra.

The economy is varied. Border factories in Juárez and Nogales make electronics and car parts for US markets, Hermosillo has a large Ford plant, and mining for gold, silver and copper continues across Sonora, Chihuahua and Durango. The Sinaloa and Sonora valleys grow tomatoes, wheat and vegetables for export, and Mazatlán lives on its port, fishing fleet and tourism.

Life follows the heat: early starts, air conditioning, and evenings on the malecón in Mazatlán or in the plazas of the capitals. Water shortages are a constant issue in the desert cities, and violence linked to organised crime affects daily routines in parts of the region.

The northwest is beef and wheat country. Sonoran carne asada, grilled over mesquite, is eaten with large, thin flour tortillas and salsas, and machaca, dried shredded beef, is scrambled with eggs for breakfast. Hermosillo is known for its hot dogs wrapped in bacon and piled with beans and salsa, and for coyotas, thin pastries filled with piloncillo, a dark unrefined sugar.

Chihuahua's Mennonite communities make a mild melting cheese, sold as queso menonita or queso Chihuahua, and the state is known for dishes in red chile colorado sauce and for burritos, often linked to Ciudad Juárez. Durango's caldillo is a beef and chile stew.

The Sinaloa coast is a seafood kitchen. Aguachile, raw shrimp cured in lime and chilli with cucumber and red onion, comes from here, along with chilorio, pork cooked in a chilli sauce and shredded, and shrimp from Mazatlán's fleet. To drink there is bacanora, an agave spirit from Sonora, sotol, distilled from the desert spoon plant in Chihuahua and Durango, and Pacífico beer, brewed in Mazatlán since 1900.

The Copper Canyon, a network of gorges deeper in places than the Grand Canyon, is the region's centrepiece. The El Chepe railway crosses it between Chihuahua and Los Mochis, and the main stop at Divisadero has rim-top views and an adventure park with cable car; Creel is the base for Rarámuri villages, Lake Arareko and valleys of rock formations, and Basaseachi Falls drops more than 200 metres to the north. The old mining town of Batopilas lies at the bottom of a canyon.

Chihuahua itself has a cathedral, murals of the state's history in the government palace, and Pancho Villa's house, now a museum of the Revolution. Further north, Paquimé at Casas Grandes is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Durango has a colonial centre on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, film sets in the desert outside the city, and the Mapimí biosphere reserve.

Sonora is the Sonoran desert: saguaro and organ-pipe cacti, the craters and dunes of El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar, and the coast at Puerto Peñasco. Further south, San Carlos near Guaymas has beaches and scuba diving, and Álamos is a well-preserved colonial silver town. On the Pacific, Mazatlán offers its historic centre with the Ángela Peralta theatre, the malecón, the El Faro lighthouse and beaches north of town.