Matamoros

Matamoros sits right against Torreón's eastern edge and belongs to the La Laguna metro area along with Torreón, Gómez Palacio and Lerdo. It is the seat of a municipality of roughly 118,000 people, about 60,000 of them in the city itself, at around 1,110 m in the Laguna desert. The name honours Mariano Matamoros, the independence-war leader.

The town grew out of the flood meadows of the Nazas River. Around 1839 settlers moved onto the Vega de Marrufo, land of the Marquisate of Aguayo, and floods pushed them to higher ground; the municipal coat of arms gives 1842 as the founding year, when the neighbouring San Juan Nepomuceno ranch, wrecked in an Apache raid, was rebuilt with help from the people of San José de Matamoros. In September 1864, with the French in Mexico, Benito Juárez came through on his way north to Chihuahua, made the settlement a villa and granted house lots to its farmers. During that stay Juan de la Cruz Borrego of El Gatuño (now Congregación Hidalgo) and a group of muleteers hid the wagons carrying the national archive in a bat cave that has been called the Cueva del Tabaco ever since. The guardians kept the papers safe for three years. The public clock of 1927 marks the decree that made Matamoros a city.

Farming carried the place for a century: cotton first, then wheat, maize, fodder and dairy cattle, with watermelon, melon and grapes also on the coat of arms. North of town, brickworks dating from the early 1900s fire a prized local clay, and mesquite from the scrub supplies the firewood and charcoal used by the bakeries. In 2023 more than a hundred Cretaceous marine fossils, including ammonites about 94 million years old, were recorded at Puerto del Perico; the municipal museum displays them.

Expect dry heat: highs sit around 35 °C from May to August, and most of the under-200 mm of yearly rain falls from July to September. December and January nights drop to 7 or 8 °C.