Ciudad Madero

Ciudad Madero is the beach side of the Tampico metropolitan area. It takes up the smallest municipality in Tamaulipas, just 46.6 km², and is its only town: 205,933 people lived there in 2020. It sits between the Pánuco River, which separates it from Veracruz to the south, and the Gulf of Mexico to the east, with Altamira to the north and Tampico to the west. The land is almost flat, with dunes and low hills to the north and west, and the climate is hot and humid, with rain concentrated from June to September, also the hottest months.

It began as a ranch on the banks of the Pánuco. The first records, from 1824, mention Doña Cecilia Villarreal, from a family that had come from Soto la Marina, who offered beds and meals to muleteers and traders in her tiled house by the Paso del Zacate, the river crossing to Veracruz. In September 1829 the Mexican army set out from her ranch toward the village of La Barra and defeated the Spanish expedition of Brigadier Isidro Barradas. Later came the railway, which built its hospital and workshops at La Barra; the lighthouse of 1883, fitted with a lamp bought in Paris; and, from 1890, the jetties guarding the river mouth. In the early 20th century foreign oil companies arrived, among them El Águila, the origin of today's Francisco I. Madero refinery. On 1 May 1924 La Barra, Árbol Grande and Doña Cecilia, together with the Miramar and Refinería neighbourhoods, became the municipality of Villa Cecilia, which was made a city in 1930 under the name Ciudad Madero.

Oil shaped the place. The refinery is still one of the most important in Mexico, and from 1958 to 1989 the city was the power base of the oil workers' union under Joaquín Hernández Galicia, "La Quina", until his arrest in the episode known as the quinazo.

For visitors, Madero means Playa Miramar, rated the most visited tourist destination in Tamaulipas: a long strip of fine sand and warm water along the Boulevard Costero, lined with hotels and seafood restaurants. At its southern end the jetties run out to sea beside the mouth of the Pánuco. Where they start there is a memorial to the crews of Mexican merchant ships sunk by submarines in the Second World War, and at the tip a small lighthouse with views of ships and shrimp boats coming and going; raccoons hang about waiting to be fed. The beach fills up on the last school day before Holy Week for the Playazo, which now draws students from Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí and Veracruz, and again during the southern Tamaulipas carnival and the summer holidays. In the centre are the 19th-century parish church of the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, Plaza Isauro Alfaro and the statue of Francisco I. Madero in front of the town hall.