La Mira

La Mira is a tenencia, or sub-district, of Lázaro Cárdenas municipality, home to 12,845 people in 2020, slightly down from 13,415 in 2010. That makes it the 37th-largest locality in Michoacán and one of the biggest in the state that is not a municipal seat. It lies about 40 metres above sea level and only 5.5 km from the Pacific, yet it is not a beach town: people here live mainly from farming and cattle on the hot coastal plain around the port, 15 km from the city.

What puts La Mira on the map is the road. Federal Highway 37, which runs 466 km down from La Piedad through Uruapan and Nueva Italia, ends here at its junction with Highway 200, the Pacific coast road. The old road to Playa Azul also runs through Acalpican and La Mira before reaching the sea, so this is the crossroads where the highland route meets the coast.

For anyone stopping, La Mira offers the everyday life of a big coastal town, with a sports ground rebuilt in 2015 with mining-fund money, and the Jesús Romero Flores public library. Its cultural hub is the Centro Cultural La Parota, opened in February 1999, which runs permanent workshops in Mexican folk dance, Polynesian dance, painting and drawing, plus piano and percussion clinics and concerts with the Conservatorio de las Rosas. Every February it marks its anniversary with exhibitions and student shows, and in October it hosts a children's literary festival. Local cooking means pescado a la talla and shrimp in many styles; the climate is tropical, averaging about 28 °C, with summer rains.