El Cielo

El Cielo is the most important protected area in northeastern Mexico: 144,530 hectares of the Sierra Madre Oriental, in the Sierra de Cucharas, spread across the municipalities of Gómez Farías, Llera, Jaumave and Ocampo. The state of Tamaulipas protected it in 1985, and since 1987 it has been part of UNESCO's network of biosphere reserves. It exists to protect cloud forest, the northernmost in Mexico, along with the country's northernmost tropical forest. The mountains climb from about 200 metres on the plain to more than 2,300 metres at the summits, and that slope holds several worlds.

On the eastern foothills, between 200 and 800 metres, grows semi-deciduous tropical forest about 20 metres tall. Between 800 and 1,400 metres is the cloud forest proper: about 2,500 mm of rain a year, moss and fungi everywhere and trees up to 30 metres; more than a thousand plant species have been recorded there, with maples, hickories, hornbeams and redbuds related to those of the eastern United States growing among tropical species. Higher up come oaks and pines, and on the leeward slopes, in the rain shadow, desert scrub: Jaumave, at the northwestern entrance, gets only 450 mm a year. The rains run from May to October, November to April is dry, and frost is common above 1,000 metres in winter.

Six species of wild cat live in the reserve, none of them common (jaguar, puma, ocelot, margay, jaguarundi and bobcat), along with a small population of black bears; surveys in the lowland forest estimated about six jaguars per 100 km². At least 255 bird species are resident and more than 175 migrants have been recorded, among them the military macaw, great curassow, yellow-headed parrot and the Tamaulipas pygmy owl, endemic to the region, plus a garter snake and two salamanders found nowhere else.

El Cielo's modern story begins with a Canadian, John William Francis "Pancho" Harrison, who in 1935 homesteaded at 1,140 metres in the cloud forest and called his farm Rancho El Cielo. The ornithologists George Sutton and Olin Pettingill arrived in 1941, and between 1948 and 1953 Paul S. Martin made a classic study of the area's reptiles and amphibians here. As logging and roads pushed in during the 1950s, Harrison handed his land to a non-profit in 1965; he was murdered the following year in a land dispute. His farm is now a biological research station.

A visit starts in Gómez Farías. A few kilometres west, on a paved road, is the Ecological Interpretive Centre, a circular building with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the forest at 360 metres. From there the old road climbs to Alta Cima at 910 metres, a community of about 180 people with cabins, a campsite, local guides and a botanical garden, and goes on to San José in the heart of the reserve, about two and a half hours by four-wheel drive from Gómez Farías. From San José trails lead to streams, waterfalls and caves such as the Cueva del Agua, and the route continues to the Piedra del Elefante and Joya de Manantiales, where a waterfall forms in the rainy season.