For a while I’ve been asking myself how it’s possible that I keep finding new natural wonders to write about for this column after 25 years of living near Guadalajara.
So, one day I sat down with a map and drew a circle around the city, with a radius of around 250 kilometers, nicely encompassing the places a Tapatio could conveniently drive to in one day.
As I looked over what was included in that circle, I realized it was filled with attractive, picturesque, exciting, charming, even amazing sites. There was Lake Chapala, biggest lake in the country, the Primavera pine and oak forest, the live and fiery Volcán de Fuego, the white sand beaches of the Pacific Coast, huge, deep canyons carved by the Santiago River, limestone mountains supporting incredibly rich cloud forests like El Cerro de Manantlán, the mangrove swamps and rivers of San Blas, teaming with bird and animal life, and much, much more.
Of course, to some extent this variety can be attributed to altitude, which ranges from the height of snow-covered Nevado de Colima (4,240 meters, 13,911 feet) to sea level on the Pacific coast. But is this diversity of ecosystems due only to altitude?
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