Olmec Capital of the World — the steamy Tabasco capital where La Venta's giant stone heads of the Americas' mother civilisation stand open-air in a jungle park, the Grijalva River flows past petroleum refineries, and the state that invented hot chocolate produces the finest cacao in Mexico
Villahermosa is the capital of Tabasco state — a flat, humid, oil-rich city on the Grijalva River in southeastern Mexico that serves as the gateway to some of the most important Olmec archaeological sites in the world. The Olmec civilisation (1500–400 BCE) is considered the 'mother culture' of Mesoamerica — predating the Maya and Aztec and establishing many of the cultural patterns (ritual ballgame, jaguar iconography, pyramid construction, chocolate use) that defined later Mesoamerican civilisations. The Parque-Museo La Venta is Villahermosa's signature attraction: an open-air jungle museum…
The area around present-day Villahermosa was part of the Olmec heartland from around 1500 BCE — La Venta (90 km west of Villahermosa), active from 900–400 BCE, was one of the two great Olmec capitals (the other being San Lorenzo, further east). The Olmec established the first complex society in Mesoamerica: the first monumental architecture in the Americas (La Venta's Great Pyramid, built around 800 BCE), the first written calendar systems, the first known use of chocolate (as a ritual beverage), and the ritual ballgame that spread throughout Mesoamerica. Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés fi…