Laguna de Cuyutlán

The Laguna de Cuyutlán is a long coastal lagoon that runs parallel to the Pacific for about 35 km southeast of the city of Manzanillo, as far as the village of Cuyutlán in the municipality of Armería. It is up to 3 km wide and covers about 7,200 hectares, divided into four sections known as vasos, and is separated from the ocean only by a barrier of old dunes up to 20 m high. Campos, Cuyutlán and numerous salt works sit on the barrier, while El Colomo, San Buenaventura, Venustiano Carranza, Nuevo Cuyutlán, Santa Rita and Armería lie along its inland shore. The lagoon makes up about 90 per cent of Colima's wetlands and is the fourth-largest coastal wetland in Mexico; Vasos III and IV, the best preserved, were listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance, covering 4,051 hectares, on 2 February 2011.

Salt has been made here since before the Spanish conquest, when it was boiled from brine; in the late 16th century the tapeixtle, a two-level structure that lets the sun do the evaporating, came into use. In 1600 the viceroy gave the town of Colima rights over the lagoon, and the dispute between haciendas and salt workers lasted some three centuries until it was settled in 1919, when President Venustiano Carranza declared the lagoon and its salt flats national property. The Sociedad Cooperativa de Salineros de Colima was founded in 1925. The harvest, or zafra, still runs from April or May until the rains, when about 300 workers rake grain salt by hand from some 12,000 crystallising beds; about 32,000 tonnes were produced in 2020. The story is told at the Museo de la Sal in Cuyutlán, housed in a 19th-century wooden salt warehouse.

By the early 1980s about half of the lagoon had silted up and dried out, and under President Miguel de la Madrid the Tepalcates canal was cut to bring seawater into Vaso II, about 7 km south of Manzanillo. From 2007 Vaso II was turned into an industrial port area, with a liquefied natural gas terminal and the canal widened from 80 to 250 m. The federal port authority now plans a much larger new container port inside Vaso II; fishers, salt workers and environmental groups marched against it in late 2025, and in January 2026 SEMARNAT asked for a new environmental impact assessment, leaving the project neither approved nor rejected. At the southeastern end, the Estero Palo Verde and its mangroves hold more than 130 bird species, and the turtle centre near Cuyutlán releases hatchlings between August and January.