La Ventosa

La Ventosa ("the windy one") is a town of about 6,100 people (2020) in the municipality of Juchitán de Zaragoza, some 18 km north-east of Juchitán by road, at 37 m above sea level. It grew up at a crossroads: here Federal Highway 190, coming from Oaxaca and Tehuantepec, meets Highway 185, the trans-isthmus road to Coatzacoalcos, and the highways and railways bound for Chiapas fan out east. Most people drive straight through, but few places show the force of the Isthmus wind so plainly.

The wind is the Tehuantepecer, or viento tehuano. When a cold front pushes cold, dense air over the Gulf of Mexico, it pours south through the Chivela Pass, the low gap in the mountains north of here, and races across the plain toward the Pacific. It blows mainly from October to February, usually at 40 to 80 km/h and occasionally much harder. Trees grow bent, roofs get torn off, and the highway near La Ventosa is notorious for overturning tractor-trailers: nine rolled over on this stretch in February 2022, and gusts reached about 110 km/h in a January 2025 cold front. Schools have closed for the wind and the road has been shut to traffic during the strongest gusts.

The same wind made the area the centre of Mexican wind power. In 1994 the CFE built the country's first wind plant, La Venta, with seven 225 kW turbines near the village of La Venta just east of here; La Venta II followed, inaugurated in March 2007 with 98 turbines, and in 2009 Iberdrola opened its first Mexican wind farm, also called La Ventosa. By 2012, 18 of Mexico's 27 wind plants stood around the town, and turbines now reach to the horizon in every direction. Land leases for the parks have been disputed by Zapotec farmers and activists, and some local farmland has turned from maize and sorghum to rented turbine sites.