Parque Estatal Cerro de la Tortuga

Cerro de la Tortuga is a hill of tropical dry forest rising beside Zacatepec in southern Morelos. The state government made it a protected natural area with the status of state park on 5 September 2012 (Periódico Oficial 5022), covering 310.199 hectares shared by the municipalities of Zacatepec and Puente de Ixtla. The decree gives its reason: urban sprawl was creeping up the hill, which it calls one of the last remnants of tropical vegetation in south-central Morelos and the only natural area of this forest type for the two municipalities. The land belongs to the Tetelpa ejido and the Xoxocotla community, and the decree requires the owners to be consulted before any activity is authorised.

The park was zoned as follows: 158 ha for conservation and use (nearly 51 percent), 94 ha for recreation, almost 24 ha for restoration and about 17 ha for grazing. The recreation zone is meant for rustic walkways, lookouts, mountain-bike routes and rest shelters. A 2021 study in Animal Biodiversity and Conservation recorded 30 mammal species in the park, 14 of them bats, and put the hill's elevation at roughly 915 to 1,200 m.

In November 2022 the state environment ministry ran a nature-spotting walk here with 20 students of the Instituto Tecnológico de Zacatepec; they logged cazahuate and pochote trees, copal and lináloe (Bursera), birds, reptiles and ringtail tracks, and uploaded the records to the Naturalista platform. That gives a fair picture of how the site is used: you visit with a guide and in coordination with the community, not at a ticket booth with services. The dry season, November to May, is the easier time to walk it, when the trails are easier to walk.