Northern Mexico is a whole different world than the Mexican heartland around Mexico City: more like the USA, with wide-open spaces and unspoiled nature. The states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Nayarit, Sinaloa, and Baja California Sur even have their own time zone, one hour behind most of the rest of Mexico. There are 5 WHS here, all very much worth visiting but rarely covered on this website. Please find below my Top Tips for Travelling to Northern Mexico as a WH Traveller.

1. It isn’t easy to find the optimal route

Beforehand, I broke my head at the optimal itinerary for the North. I ended up cutting it into 3 segments and flying between them (Chihuahua, Hermosillo, and La Paz (Baja California)). However, it is possible to do them in one go by public transport: Chihuahua – Casas Grandes (for Paquimé WHS) – Nogales – Puerto Penasco (for El Pinacate WHS, needs a tour, and the Gulf of California too) - Mexicali – San Ignacio (for El Vizcaino and Sierra de San Francisco , both need a tour) – Loreto (for the Gulf of California, needs a tour) – La Paz. A longer alternative is to start in Ciudad Juarez, go …

The Rock Paintings of the Sierra de San Francisco have hardly been reviewed on this website so far, so let’s start with the basics. The included area is large (it’s even in the Top 20 of largest cultural WHS ) and stretches out north of Mexico’s Highway #1 in Baja California Sur between San Ignacio and El Porvenir. It holds several hundred small groups of rock paintings and rock carvings. The area is remote and difficult to access: for a day trip you have the choice between Ratón (via San Francisco de la Sierra: needs 4WD, an only short climb up a staircase, small group of paintings) and Palmarito (via Santa Martha: car with good clearance needed, requires a 1.5-hour hike, rock face with abundant paintings). If you go by yourself, you need to report to the INAH office in San Ignacio beforehand to pay the entrance fee and they will let the local caretaker know that you’re coming and he will lead you to the site of the rock art. Multi-day trips that are offered by specialized outfitters use mules to trek to the even more isolated cave paintings, which are also said to be the best.

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I visited the Grey whales at San Ignacio Lagoon, one of the two locations that make up the Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaino . The B&B where I was staying (Ignacio Springs) booked the whale tour for me – beforehand I thought that you had to book as early as possible, but the lady just phoned in the night before. As always with sea-based tours: the weather & wind can cause cancellations, so it’s best to allow for a couple of days in the area (also to tick off the nearby Rock Paintings of the Sierra de San Francisco WHS, with which it even shared the initial nomination until they were wisely split up by World Heritage Bureau).

From the town of San Ignacio, which lies on Highway 1, it’s another 1-1.5 hour drive to get to the actual lagoon. The first 45km is on an easy, paved road, the last 15 on a relatively bumpy unpaved one. There’s nothing here but a few basic camps and some mudflats. The operator I used was Antonio’s Ecotours, which asks 60 USD per person for the tour. The boats can hold up to 12 people, but on mine …

EPGDABR , short for “El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar National Biosphere Reserve”, is another rarely visited WHS in the far North of Mexico. After contemplating a lot of options on how to get there ( Fly to Mexicali and rent a car? Take a bus the loooong way west from Chihuahua? ), I stumbled upon a 2-day / 1-night camping tour out of the Sonoran state capital of Hermosillo. It ticked all my boxes as it would cover both the sand dunes (Gran Desierto) and the volcanic landscape (El Pinacate), provide transport & lodging, and it was cheap and convenient as well. This WHS is complicated in many ways, so brace yourself for a long review.

The first question that needs to be answered is “What is it exactly about?”. The landscape is a mix of volcanic craters, cactuses, high sand dunes, and starry nights, all in the Sonoran Desert. As the long name already suggests, it covers actually two adjacent areas with different values. I can see that for management purposes they have been linked, but it does feel like visiting two different sites. El Pinacate I would describe as “Iceland with cactuses”, while the …

I didn’t want to come back from a visit to the Aqueduct of Padre Tembleque with the same story and the same photos as all reviewers before me. So, after digging through the nomination file and looking at the official map, it became clear to me that the two endpoints of the hydraulic system, the towns of Otumba and Zempoala, also are part of the core zone. And luckily there are buses all day long from Mexico City to Otumba. They are run by the same company that goes to Teotihuacan from Area 7 at Terminal Norte bus station. They have a cute map on their website which suggests that you can reach Zempoala with them as well.

After a drive of about 1.5 hours, the bus dropped me at the town entrance and I walked on to the central square. The first (and maybe only) eye-catcher in Otumba is the Church and Convent of the Immaculate Conception, also built under the auspices of Padre Tembleque. The church seems much too big for the town. It has a spacious plaza in front: as in many places in early colonial Mexico, services for the indigenous people were …

While travelling in Mexico and reading other people’s reviews of Turkey, I was thinking that these 2 countries must be among the best WHS travel has to offer. But what about China? It has a huge list already, with many very fine sites. For an answer, I decided to query the data that we have gathered from the ratings of WHS by community members. Which countries are overall best for WHS?

Top Lists

I did a few selections that seemed appropriate to answer the question. You can do your own by looking at the Country Ranking page.

Overall the best countries, with an average score of 4 or higher, are:

1. Zambia - 4.8
2. Afghanistan - 4.7
3. DRC/Holy See - 4.6
4. Palau/Chad - 4.5
5. Haiti - 4.4
6. New Zealand - 4.3
7. Yemen/Sudan - 4.2
8. Guatemala/Honduras/Namibia - 4.1
9. Ireland/Libya/Solomon Islands/Tanzania - 4.0

Looking only at the countries with 5 WHS or more, the ranking is:

1. DRC - 4.6
2. Libya/Tanzania - 4.0
3. Egypt/Zimbabwe - 3.9
4. Algeria/Argentina/Syria/Turkey/Uzbekistan - 3.8
5. Australia/Peru/USA - 3.7

And among the large countries, with …

Paquimé , located over 1,700 km north of Mexico City, is a site that is often overlooked. It doesn’t have the great monuments that other pre-Columbian Mexican sites are known for. It’s a niche site for archaeologists, exemplifying architectural and trading links between the area of the Classic Pueblo sites (now located in the Southwest USA) and Mesoamerica. Research has never been intensive, as archaeologists traditionally focus on either one of these worlds. But I was pleasantly surprised by its size and good condition. For me, it closed a circle after having already seen the other Puebloan sites of Mesa Verde , Taos , and Chaco . A visit also brings a lot of insight into the specific history of this region, always so far away from everything.

After walking past the still closed entrance barrier at the opening hour of 10 a.m., I was welcomed in by the guard and his German shepherd dog (I kept a safe distance, much more than 1.5m!) and sent on my way to walk the circuit that is signposted at the site. The first structure one encounters here is the ball court – it looks like a simpler …

Generally, I find it hard to prepare for sites within my own region with the same level of detail as I do for more exotic WHS. For example the City of Luxembourg : I had been there in 1984 and 2001, but couldn’t tell you more than I liked the panoramas. Most of the other reviews to date are also fairly superficial. A breakthrough in the knowledge of this WHS came when Jurre recently suggested some 25 new connections for it. During a 3 night revisit right after Christmas 2021, I further discovered that from a WH perspective it has at least 3 remarkable features that I was not aware of beforehand: its boundaries, a list of 20 notable monuments, and controversy before inscription.

The Boundaries

Although Luxemburg’s city centre is only small already, the core zone of this WHS covers an even smaller part. There is a hugely detailed official map available, but on the ground, the borders between core and buffer zones are hard to distinguish. Unfortunately, not everything that looks like an old rampart is included, neither is every 19th-century public building. Previous reviewers mentioned Fort Thüngen, Place Guillaume, and Place d'Armes, …

Yesterday, January 1st 2022, I have started the next iteration of my life-long World Heritage Journey. I have quit my IT job and handed in my company lease car. I will do nothing else for a while other than travelling to WHS, writing about WHS, learning about WHS, engaging in the discourse on WHS, maybe even building a career out of it. It’s a dream that I always have hoped to fulfill, and all signs are positive now to take the jump. My " Missing Map " shows the To-do List:

Why 1100 WHS in 2030?

My original goal was “to see all WHS before I die”. But you never know when you are going to die, it may come earlier than statistics predict. And we also do not know whether the WH List will ever be finite. At this moment in time, I think I will be quite satisfied at reaching 1100. I do not long for those remote diving locations (eg. Cocos Island , Revillagigedo ) and there’s the issue that a longer list will not make the content better. With an average of 20 new additions per year, I expect that the List will be 1314 sites …

2021 wasn’t the travel year we expected it to become, with a lot of Covid restrictions still or again in place. However, most borders opened in some form and after jumping through the right hoops (vaccine certificates, test results, QR codes) travel in large parts of the world was possible without a problem. This website thrived anyway, with visitor numbers back to normal so people at least have regained their appetite for reading about and planning travel.

Community Travel

Fortunately, the combined 2020/2021 WHC brought 34 new sites to tick off without having to leave the house. Each of these 34 has been visited by at least one community member; Dholavira proved to be the most difficult with 2 visitors so far claiming it. Zoe had the most of these 34 (25), followed by Thomas and Stanislaw with 17 each. Check the Top 50 scorers here .

Among the Top 10 travellers, Thomas has gained the most ground in the past year. Mikko has reclaimed his spot in the Top 10, due to his good score at the 2020/2021 WHC. Luis Filipe Gaspar banked over 80 and is close to the Top 10 now.