Mexico · MX

Cerro El Ixcapil

Cerro El Ixcapil is a modest, quietly compelling summit in the highlands of southern Jalisco, rising to about 2,106 metres (6,909 ft) on the southern rim of the Sayula valley. Part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt (the Cordillera Neovolcánica), it is one of the most prominent of the ten named hills that crowd around the Pueblo Mágico of Sayula, and it makes a rewarding half-day climb for walkers who want a genuine, uncommercialized view over the salt lakes, farmland and volcano-studded ridge of Mexico's Alto Sur region. There is no ticket office, no summit café and barely a marked trail here. That is precisely the appeal: El Ixcapil is a working landscape hill, ringed by cornfields, agave and oak-pine woods, approached from the colonial town of Sayula a short drive to the north. Locals surround it with old legends—stories of buried pyramid stones from a pre-Hispanic past long destroyed and forgotten—giving the bare crest an atmosphere that taller, more famous peaks sometimes lack.