Mexico

Thirty-one states and Mexico City

Mexico is far bigger and more varied than the beach-resort version most visitors see. Its 32 federal entities run from the deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua to the cloud forests of Chiapas, with colonial highland cities, two coastlines, and the Yucatán's Maya country in between. Cancún and the Riviera Maya give most travelers Quintana Roo; Mexico City and a side trip to Puebla or Querétaro add the central highlands. After that, the map gets pleasantly empty.

Some states are easy to collect in clusters. The Bajío — Guanajuato, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, and Aguascalientes — is a tight loop of UNESCO-listed colonial cities. Oaxaca and Chiapas pair well for food and indigenous culture. Baja California and Baja California Sur are a single long road trip, with whale-watching at the bottom in winter. The northern border states tend to be the last ones filled in, and Tlaxcala, the smallest state, is the one people forget even when they've driven straight through it.

How the map is drawn

Boundaries come from Natural Earth, and Mexico City is labelled as Ciudad de México (it stopped being the Distrito Federal in 2016). The State of Mexico, which wraps around the capital, is shown as Estado de México to avoid confusing it with the country. Click a state once for visited, again for want-to-go; your marks here don't affect the country-level world map, so you can have Mexico fully visited there and still be working on the states here.

A few routes that cover a lot of states

The Ruta de la Independencia through the Bajío connects Querétaro, Guanajuato, and San Miguel de Allende with Mexico City in a single long weekend and three states. The Yucatán Peninsula is a clean trio — Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Campeche — with Mérida and the Maya ruins in the middle. Oaxaca and Chiapas link by the Pacific coast road or a flight to San Cristóbal de las Casas. The Copper Canyon railway from Los Mochis to Chihuahua crosses Sinaloa and Chihuahua through country most visitors never see, and it's one of the great train journeys in the Americas.