Centro Histórico de Ciudad Victoria

The Centro Histórico of Ciudad Victoria is the old core of Tamaulipas's capital, with the Sierra Madre Oriental as a backdrop to the west. José de Escandón founded the Villa de Santa María de Aguayo here on 6 October 1750, during the colonisation of Nuevo Santander, and on 20 April 1825 the state congress made it a city named Victoria, after Mexico's first president, and the state capital. In June 2024, at the Tianguis Internacional de Pueblos Mágicos in San Antonio, Texas, Mexico's federal Tourism Secretariat named the centre a Barrio Mágico, the first in Tamaulipas.

Most of what you see dates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, built of sillar stone while Governor Guadalupe Mainero drew investment and modernised the city. The railway station opened in 1893; in 1896 teacher Estefanía Castañeda founded the state's first kindergarten; in 1897 a bust of Juárez went up in the old Plaza de la Libertad, now Plaza Juárez; and in 1898 a mule-drawn tram ran along Calle Hidalgo to the station, the same year the Méndez and Palermo promenades were laid out in imitation of the Champs-Élysées. In 1884 three Italian brothers, the Filizola Gaetani, built a trading house of more than 2,000 m² on Calle Hidalgo; restored from 2016, it is now the Pinacoteca de Tamaulipas.

Plaza Juárez is the civic centre: the Palacio de Gobierno, opened in 1951, is where governors lead the Grito on Independence night, and the Teatro Juárez, opened in 1957, holds a mural by Alfonso Xavier Peña. The Federal Palace and its streets form a large T, for Tamaulipas. Nearby are the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, seat of the diocese since 1962, the basilica of Nuestra Señora del Refugio, the regional history museum in the former Asilo Vicentino, and the Calle Mágica, on Zaragoza between Calles 15 and 16, painted in bright colours and with a mural by Alejandro Rosales Lugo. To eat, try the local flour-tortilla flautas, gorditas, which Doña Tota began selling here in 1952, and the tacos of the old station.