Ahome

Villa de Ahome, as locals call it to tell it apart from the municipality, is a town of about 11,000 people some 24 km from Los Mochis, on the banks of the Río Fuerte. Its official founding date is August 15, 1605, when the Jesuit missionary Andrés Pérez de Ribas arrived; he preached to the Ahome people and wrote about his work in a history of the missions published in Madrid. When Ahome municipality was created by a decree of December 1916, the villa became its seat, with the first council installed on January 5, 1917. It kept that role until 1935, when the government moved to Los Mochis, the city that had grown up around the sugar mill. Ahome was named a Pueblo Señorial in 2010, and in August 2025, after a site visit, the head of historic sites at Mexico's federal culture ministry said it has what it takes to become a Pueblo Mágico.

The center is best seen on foot: cobbled streets and 19th-century houses around the Benito Juárez square, two of which belonged to the merchant Zacarías Ochoa. The Casa Azul, built in 1913, housed the first town council and is now a community museum with old objects and photographs and 18 awards donated by the singer and actor José Ángel Espinoza "Ferrusquilla", who grew up here. The district offices occupy the Casco de Ahome, a former hacienda from 1872, and the old town hall carries the clock that Álvaro Obregón gave the town in 1912, with European-made works; that same year Obregón laid the first stone of the school named after him, still in use. The clock has stopped, and local officials have asked for funds to repair it.

There is also the 19th-century church of San Antonio de Padua, murals by local artists Alejandro Álvarez and Jorge Robles on walls and in the Jesse James Maxwell park, the welcome arch, and the remains of El Águila, Ahome's first sugar mill, older than the one in Los Mochis, which drew Benjamin Francis Johnson to the region. At the edge of town the Fuerte runs between big poplars. Nearby La Florida, a Yoreme (Mayo) community, has the ceremonial center closest to the villa, where traditional medicine, dance, music and language are kept alive; its Holy Week rites are a community celebration of faith. Food runs from ceviche, fish and shrimp to birria, barbacoa, slow-roasted lamb, gorditas and menudo. The town's anniversary is celebrated on August 19 and 20 with a parade and the crowning of a queen.