Cañón del Río Blanco National Park is protected natural area in

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

Veracruz Veracruz (), formally Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave), is one of the 31 states which, along with Me ...

state.

Geography

Cañón del Río Blanco National Park covers an area of 488 km². The park includes the upper watershed of the Río Blanco, where the river has carved a canyon through the

Sierra Madre de Oaxaca The Sierra Madre de Oaxaca is a mountain range in southern Mexico. It is primarily in the state of Oaxaca, and extends north into the states of Puebla and Veracruz. Geography The mountain range begins at Pico de Orizaba, and extends in a southeas ...

, plunging over rapids and waterfalls as it descends from the mountains towards the

Gulf Coastal Plain The Gulf Coastal Plain extends around the Gulf of Mexico in the Southern United States and eastern Mexico. This coastal plain reaches from the Florida Panhandle, southwest Georgia, the southern two-thirds of Alabama, over most of Mississippi, wes ...

to empty into the

Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico ( es, Golfo de México) is an oceanic basin, ocean basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of ...

. The park is in the Sierra de Zongolica, the northern sub-range of the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca.

Pico de Orizaba Pico de Orizaba, also known as Citlaltépetl (from Nahuatl = star, and = mountain), is an inactive stratovolcano, the highest mountain in Mexico and the third highest in North America, after Denali of Alaska in the United States and Mount Loga ...

, a volcano the

Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt The Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt ( es, Eje Volcánico Transversal), also known as the Transvolcanic Belt and locally as the (''Snowy Mountain Range''), is an active volcanic belt that covers central-southern Mexico. Several of its highest peaks h ...

and Mexico's highest peak, lies several kilometers north of the park.

Flora and fauna

Plant communities in the park include pine forest, oak forest, montane moist evergreen forest, and evergreen rain forest."Cañón del Río Blanco". Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, Government of Mexico. Accessed 9 October 2021

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Conservation

Cañón del Río Blanco was decreed a national park in 1938 by president

Lázaro Cárdenas Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (; 21 May 1895 – 19 October 1970) was a Mexican army officer and politician who served as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. Born in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, to a working-class family, Cárdenas joined the M ...

References

{{Reflist National parks of Mexico Protected areas of Veracruz Petén–Veracruz moist forests Sierra Madre de Oaxaca Cloud forests of Mexico