The 10 Best Travel Experiences in Mexico

Chichen Itza was one of the great cities of the Maya world, and its restored centrepiece, the stepped pyramid of El Castillo, is the image of pre-Columbian Mexico.

The temple is a stone calendar: at the equinoxes the afternoon sun casts a serpent of shadow down its northern staircase.

Beyond it sprawl the Great Ball Court, the Temple of the Warriors and a thousand columns.

Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities in the ancient world, and its two great pyramids — the Sun and the Moon — still dominate the Mexican plateau just outside the capital.

The Avenue of the Dead runs more than two kilometres between them, past palace complexes decorated with faded murals.

Both main pyramids can be climbed, and the view from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun takes in the whole site and the mountains beyond.

Guanajuato is a former silver-mining city built into a ravine, its brightly painted houses stacked up impossibly steep hillsides and connected by a maze of underground tunnels and narrow alleys.

The centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site of baroque churches and plazas, and the Callejón del Beso — an alley so narrow that neighbouring balconies almost touch — draws crowds for its star-crossed-lovers legend.

Tulum is the only major Maya city built directly on the coast, its stone temples and watchtowers standing on a low cliff above a beach of white sand and turquoise water.

The site is small compared to Chichén Itzá, but the setting — walled ruins on one side, Caribbean Sea on the other — is unmatched.

Visitors can walk the perimeter path in under an hour, then head down the wooden stairs to swim below the cliffs.

Sheer limestone walls rise up to 1,000 metres above the Grijalva River in this dramatic Chiapas canyon, explored almost entirely by boat.

Crocodiles bask on the riverbanks and spider monkeys move through trees clinging to the cliff face, visible at close range from the water.

A formation locally called the Christmas Tree - moss and mineral deposits forming a tree-like shape on the rock wall - is the trip's signature stop.

Hierve el Agua is a set of mineral-rich springs in the hills outside Oaxaca that have calcified over thousands of years into cliffside formations resembling frozen waterfalls.

Two natural infinity pools sit right at the cliff edge, letting swimmers look out over the valley below.

The site is far quieter than Mexico's beach and pyramid destinations, reachable only by a bumpy mountain road.

Mexico's Copper Canyon is actually a network of canyons in the Sierra Madre Occidental, several deeper than the Grand Canyon, cut by rivers through pine forest and red rock.

The main way to see it is the Chepe train, which crosses 37 bridges and passes through 86 tunnels on its way between the desert lowlands and the pine-covered rim.

Small Rarámuri (Tarahumara) communities still live within the canyon system.

Isla Holbox is a car-free sandbar island off Mexico's Yucatán coast, reached only by boat, with sandy streets, pastel-painted guesthouses, and a slower pace than the resorts of Cancún.

Whale sharks gather in the surrounding waters from roughly June to September, drawing snorkel trips out to swim alongside them, and the island's shallow lagoon glows with bioluminescent plankton on dark nights.

A limestone sinkhole near Tulum with startlingly clear freshwater, shallow turquoise pools giving way to dramatic cave passages hung with stalactites.

Turtles and small fish glide beneath snorkelers in water so clear it barely seems real, especially deeper into the cavern sections.

A cinder cone volcano that famously erupted from a level cornfield in 1943, growing to over 400 metres within a decade and burying two villages under lava - one of the few volcanoes in the world whose entire life cycle has been documented from birth.

The half-buried bell tower of San Juan Parangaricutiro's church still protrudes from the hardened lava field, an eerie, singular sight.

Horseback rides across the black lava field to the church ruins, followed by a hike up the cinder cone itself, make for a genuinely unusual full day out.