Soto la Marina

Soto la Marina is a cattle town on the banks of the Soto la Marina River, between Ciudad Victoria and the Gulf coast, which lies about 50 km downstream at La Pesca. José de Escandón founded it on 3 September 1750 and named it after the village in Cantabria where he was born, with the martyrs Celedonius and Emeterius, protectors of Santander, as its patron saints. The first 48 families, criollos recruited in Monterrey, spent a year on the road because they had first been sent to found a settlement on the Nueces River, where some of them died. The first site was beside a stream now called Marina Vieja, and in 1810 a yellow fever epidemic forced the town to move upriver to where it stands today.

National history came ashore here. On 15 April 1817 the Spaniard Francisco Xavier Mina landed at the river bar to support the insurgents; when he took the town he set up the first printing press in Tamaulipas, now kept in Monterrey, and two months later royalist forces retook the place after the siege of Soto la Marina. In 1824 Agustín de Iturbide returned from exile along this same coast; a monument on El Chamal ranch marks where he was held prisoner, and the 18th-century hacienda building was his stop on the way to Padilla. The town keeps the house of General Felipe de la Garza, built in the 1830s, and José María Jesús Carbajal, a founder of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande, died on his ranch here in 1874. In 2010 Hurricane Alex hit the town head-on.

Today it is the last stop before the sea. The road continues to La Pesca, with a long beach north of the Punta Piedra lighthouse, sport fishing in the Gulf and on the river, and free access to the sand, though vehicles may only drive in the zones the municipality marks out; up to 50,000 people come at Easter. In town, the regional fair in Holy Week brings dances, fairground rides and fishing tournaments, and local craftspeople weave chairs, baskets and cases from palm. About 25 km southwest, in the Sierra de Tamaulipas, lies El Sabinito, a Huastec site found in 1982 when logging roads were cut, with more than 600 house platforms.