Caleras

Caleras is a village of 1,733 people (2020 census) at 80 metres above sea level, where the Tecomán plain first runs into the hills. The name, which means lime kilns, fits: these hills are limestone, and the stone is still quarried a couple of kilometres from the village by the Holcim cement plant that opened in late 1993 on the road to Caleras and can now turn out about 2.5 million tonnes a year.

Pre-Hispanic tombs have been found on Cerro de Caleras, part of the deep past of the Colima coast. The village itself is young: it had 188 inhabitants in 1940, passed a thousand by 1960, and since 2000 has held steady at around 1,700 to 1,850. It has its own Junta Municipal, the auxiliary authority under Tecomán's town council.

Caleras lies on the alternate road between Colima and Tecomán, the old highway that runs alongside the motorway. Since the Colima–Manzanillo motorway was widened, traffic through the village has grown so much that in May 2026 residents blocked the road from the Puerta de Caleras to the bullring, and roadworks that year stretched the usual twenty-minute trip to Tecomán to as much as an hour. That same May, an armed clash in Caleras led to roadblocks and burning vehicles in the area.