Siete Luminarias (The Seven Luminaries) is a group of seven extinct volcanoes in central Mexico, located in and around the town of

Valle de Santiago Valle de Santiago is a ''municipio'' (municipality) in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and also the name of its largest township and '' cabecera municipal'' (municipal seat). The municipality is located in the southern portion of the state in th ...

in the state of

Guanajuato Guanajuato (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Guanajuato ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Guanajuato), is one of the 32 states that make up the Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 46 municipalities and its capital city i ...

Geography

The Siete Luminarias are low-rimmed volcanoes, or

maar A maar is a broad, low-relief volcanic crater caused by a phreatomagmatic eruption (an explosion which occurs when groundwater comes into contact with hot lava or magma). A maar characteristically fills with water to form a relatively shallow ...

s, with steep-sided, flat-bottomed central craters up to one kilometer in diameter. The seven craters are Hoya la Alberca (1672 meters elevation), Hoya de Cíntora (1703 m), Hoya de Flores or Hoya de Alvarez (2100 m), Rincón de Parangueo (2050 m), Hoya de San Nicolás de Parangueo (1820 m), Hoya Blanca (1819 m), and Hoya Solís (1787 m). The volcanoes are part of the Michoacán–Guanajuato volcanic field. The Siete Luminarias are in the

Bajío El Bajío (the ''lowland'') is a cultural and geographical region within the central Mexican plateau which roughly spans from north-west of the Mexico City metropolitan area to the main silver mines in the northern-central part of the country. Thi ...

region, a fertile agricultural region in the southwestern portion of the

Mexican Plateau The Central Mexican Plateau, also known as the Mexican Altiplano ( es, Altiplanicie Mexicana), is a large arid-to-semiarid plateau that occupies much of northern and central Mexico. Averaging above sea level, it extends from the US-Mexico border ...

. The Bajío is in the basin of the

Lerma River The Lerma River ( es, Río Lerma) is Mexico's second longest river. It is a river in west-central Mexico that begins in Mexican Plateau at an altitude over above sea level, and ends where it empties into Lake Chapala, Mexico's largest lake, near ...

, which flows from east to west to the north of the volcanoes. Four craters – Rincón de Parangueo, San Nicolás de Parangono, La Alberca, and Cíntora – were formerly home to crater lakes, but over-extraction of groundwater has caused all these lakes to dry up.Alcocer, J., Bernal-Brooks, F.W. (2019). Physical and Chemical Characterization of Inland Waters. In: Ibáñez, A. (eds) ''Mexican Aquatic Environments''. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11126-7_1

Flora and fauna

Siete Luminarias is in the

Bajío dry forests The Bajío dry forests is a tropical dry broadleaf forest ecoregion in western−central Mexico. Geography The Bajío dry forests lie in the southwestern portion of the Mexican Plateau. They are bounded on the southeast, south, and southwest by ...

ecoregion An ecoregion (ecological region) or ecozone (ecological zone) is an ecologically and geographically defined area that is smaller than a bioregion, which in turn is smaller than a biogeographic realm. Ecoregions cover relatively large areas of l ...

."La Region Volcanica Siete Luminarias"
DOPA Explorer. Accessed 23 July 2022.

Conservation

In 1997 Siete Luminarias was declared a

natural monument A natural monument is a natural or natural/cultural feature of outstanding or unique value because of its inherent rarity, representative of aesthetic qualities or cultural significance. Under World Commission on Protected Areas guidelines, nat ...

by the government of Mexico. It covers an area of 89.28 km² to the south, west, and northwest of the city of Valle de Santiago.

References

{{Commons category Natural monuments of Mexico Protected areas of Guanajuato Volcanoes of Guanajuato Maars of Mexico Bajío dry forests Michoacán–Guanajuato volcanic field