A short distance west of the crater lake of Santa María del Oro, in the west Mexico state of Nayarit, is Ceboruco volcano which has a cobblestone road to the top. The road starts from the old and picturesque village of Jala, eight kilometers off the main highway (Highway 15). The cornfields around Jala yield some of the largest ears of corn in the world, more than 30 centimeters (one foot) in length, a cause for celebration in the village’s annual August festival. Jala was declared a Magic Town in 2012.
The road up Ceboruco is a geologist’s or biologist’s dream come true, a slowly unfolding series of volcanic forms and different types of vegetation with abundant surprises even for the scientifically expert. Small wonder, then, that the great German botanist Karl Theodor Hartweg was so impressed with Ceboruco when he collected plants here in the nineteenth century. To read more about his discoveries, see The geography of garden flowers, many of which originated in Mexico.
Near the top are several short but interesting walks, some in shady, thickly vegetated valleys hidden between towering walls of blocky lava, some along the many overlapping rims of the various old craters of which this complex peak is comprised. Wherever you choose to walk, a multicolored profusion of flowers and butterflies will greet your eyes.
On the south side of an attractive grassy valley at kilometer sixteen, fumaroles send hot gases and steam high into the air reminding us that this volcano is not yet irrevocably extinct. A massive Plinian eruption in about the year 1000 sent ash plumes into the air and devastated a wide area around the volcano. The huge blocks of lava near the summit date from a prolonged series of eruptions in the early 1870s.
Highway 15 cuts through Ceboruco’s lava field a few kilometers after the Jala junction. For those not wishing to brave the cobblestone road up to the volcano, this is a good place to stretch the legs and marvel at the inhospitable, black lava blocks which were spewed out more than a hundred years ago.
This is a lightly edited extract from my “Western Mexico: A Traveler’s Treasury” (link is to Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature), also available as either a Kindle edition or Kobo ebook.
Want to read more about Mexico’s geomorphosites? The link uses Geo-Mexico’s “Site Search” feature.
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