Tabasco

Tabasco is the cradle of Olmec civilization and one of the most important states for understanding the origins of Mesoamerica: La Venta, 130 kilometers from Villahermosa, was the most important religious and political capital of the Olmecs between 900 and 400 B.C., and its enormous basalt colossal heads—transported from the mountains of Veracruz without wheels or beasts of burden—remain one of the most fascinating mysteries of pre-Columbian archaeology.

Villahermosa, the capital, has the rhythm of a tropical city where heat and humidity define the pace of life: the river seafood markets, tacos de pejelagarto—the prehistoric fish with hard scales that lives only in the rivers of Tabasco and Chiapas—, and Mexico's finest chocolate produced in the cacao haciendas of Comalcalco make Tabasco a world-class gastronomic state, little known beyond its borders.

The La Venta park-museum is an essential visit: the Olmecs moved their monuments to the Villahermosa park in the nineteen-fifties to protect them from oil, and today the colossal heads, altars and stelae emerge among ceiba trees and iguanas in one of the most spectacular open-air museums in Latin America.

Tabasco's rivers, lagoons and jungles hold extraordinary biodiversity: the Pantanos de Centla Biosphere Reserve, the mangroves of the Grijalva-Usumacinta delta and the breeding sites of the swamp crocodile are testimony to an ecosystem that oil threatened for decades but is beginning to recover today.