About Tampico, Mexico

Nostalgia can be felt closely in the Port of Tampico as in few other places in Mexico. Warm, friendly and including, the people from Tampico know how to treat visitors, be they immigrants, tourists or just passing through. It is the city where one thousand languages have ceased to exist and where one thousand voices have stuttered their first words in Spanish. It is also a happy, fun-loving city that was built by hard labor and with the richness of the land and the sea, and it has an extraordinary history.



Tampico looks especially attractive today, as it has been looked after and rejuvenated by its inhabitants, who are very proud of their city. The archetypal wooden houses and big elegant buildings combine together to form a most unusual Mexican urban landscape. Walking through the Historic Center of Tampico is like walking towards the beginnings of the modern age. But Tampico is not only tradition. Its urban development took spaces for recreation and amusement into consideration, and visitors can fill the hours doing a lot of really fun things: parks, lakes, archeological sites, modern bridges and the space reserved for the conservation of nature is limited only by the warm sea of the Gulf of Mexico.



The origins of the city of Tampico date back to the first years of the colonies when Brother Andrés de Olmos founded the town of San Luis de Tampico north of its current location on April 26, 1554. The richness of its salt mines and the need to find a location more in accordance with its vocation brought about the founding of modern Tampico on April 12, 1823. Its name at that time was Santa Anna de Tampico. During its peak years, silver from San Luis Potosí left its docks and imported goods, clothes and prefabricated wooden houses that would set the style of the city¡¯s architecture landed there. Towards the end of the 19th century, facilities were built to receive coal from Europe, and when the coal industry went into crisis, the port became the biggest throat to exhale oil. The arrival of thousands of immigrants from all over the world helped the city flourish.



The city of Tampico is linked with two other towns that together form the metropolitan area: Almira to the north and Ciudad Madero to the south. Located on the left hand side of the Panuco River that arrives here almost dried up from its furiously flowing journey down the Eastern Sierra Madre, Tampico is currently the second most important port in Mexico and it could not have a better geographical location from the point of view of international trade.