Lázaro Cárdenas

Lázaro Cárdenas is a port city of about 84,000 people (2020) at the southern tip of Michoacán, where the Balsas river, the border with Guerrero, flows into the Pacific. It has grown together with Las Guacamayas and La Orilla into an urban area of nearly 200,000, the fourth largest in the state. The place was long a farming settlement called Los Llanitos, part of Arteaga; it became the tenencia of Melchor Ocampo in 1932, later a municipality, and on 17 November 1970, a month after the death of former president Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, the town and municipality took his name. History here goes further back than the port: in 1523 the Spanish founded the Villa de Concepción de Zacatula at the mouth of the Balsas, and on Hernán Cortés's orders built there the first shipyard on Mexican soil.

The modern city is a product of the 1970s, when the federal government chose the Balsas delta for a deep-water port and a steelworks fed by the iron deposits of Las Truchas, as the spearhead of a plan to industrialise the coast. Today the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas is the largest seaport in Mexico, handling containers, bulk minerals, fluids and car exports, with the only access channel in the country dredged to 18 m and a rail line running to Kansas City. The ArcelorMittal plant is described as the largest steelworks in Latin America. This is a working city rather than a resort, and the town centre is modern, with the white Cathedral of Cristo Rey, seat of the diocese, and the Casa de la Cultura José Vasconcelos, founded in 1979.

For visitors, Lázaro Cárdenas is mainly the gateway and supply base for the Michoacán coast: it has the hotels, restaurants, bus terminals, ATMs and reliable petrol stations that the beaches to the north-west lack. You can walk the broad malecón along the river channel, with views of the port cranes, take a boat trip through the estuaries to look for crocodiles, or drive the 14 km coastal boulevard that runs from Playa Eréndira, about 5 km from the centre, past the sea and the wetlands to Playa Azul. The climate is hot all year, averaging about 26 °C, with rain in summer.