Gateway to the Copper Canyon — the Chepe train through the Sierra Madre, Pancho Villa's stronghold, Mennonite cheese markets, and the most dramatically isolated canyon system in the Americas
Chihuahua is the capital of Mexico's largest state and the gateway to the Barrancas del Cobre — the Copper Canyon — a system of six interconnected canyons carved by the Urique, Septentrión, and Conchos rivers that is wider, deeper, and more extensive than the Grand Canyon of the United States, and home to the Rarámuri (Tarahumara) people for whom the canyons are the living world. The Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico — El Chepe — one of the greatest train journeys in the world, runs from Chihuahua through 87 tunnels and 37 bridges over 655 km to Los Mochis on the Pacific coast, descending fro…
Chihuahua was founded by the Spanish in 1709 as a mining center for the silver discovered in the Sierra Madre Occidental — the 18th-century silver boom made it one of the most important cities in New Spain. The Spanish colonial-era Cathedral of Chihuahua, completed in 1789 after a century of construction, is considered one of the finest examples of Mexican Baroque architecture. Chihuahua played a central role in Mexico's independence movement: Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the 'Father of Mexican Independence,' was executed here in 1811. In the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, Chihuahua was Panch…