Popocatépetl & Iztaccíhuatl

According to a story told long before the Spanish arrived, Popocatépetl was a warrior in love with Iztaccíhuatl, the daughter of a ruler. He was sent to war on the promise that he could marry her if he came back victorious. In his absence a rival spread word that he had died, and the princess died of grief.

When Popocatépetl came home and found her gone, the account holds, he carried her body up to the mountains and laid her down. He knelt beside her with a smoking torch to keep watch, and the two were turned to snow and rock. That is why, tradition says, one peak lies still in the shape of a sleeping woman and the other smokes over her without end.

The two volcanoes are joined by a high saddle called Paso de Cortés, at about 3,600 m. From it the names make sense: Popocatépetl is a steep cone that vents gas and ash, while Iztaccíhuatl is a long ridge whose rises read as a head, chest, knees and feet.

Both stand inside Iztaccíhuatl-Popocatépetl National Park, created in 1935 and one of the oldest in Mexico. Popocatépetl reaches around 5,393 m and Iztaccíhuatl around 5,230 m, making them the second and third highest mountains in the country after Pico de Orizaba.

Nahua peoples have lived around these mountains for a very long time, and worship on the peaks is old: ruined shrines have been found as high as about 3,600 m. The volcanoes are treated as living, weather-making powers rather than as inert rock.

Popocatépetl is known affectionately as Don Goyo, short for Gregorio, and is celebrated on 12 March, the feast of Saint Gregory. Specialists called tiemperos or graniceros, said to be chosen by the volcano through dreams or a lightning strike, lead the rites. On the mountain birthday people carry flowers, food and drink high up the slope and leave them near the crater, asking for rain and calm.

On the lower slopes and in the valleys around the volcanoes stand fourteen monasteries built in the 16th century by Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars as they converted the region. Together they were listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1994.

They are early and unusually complete, and they introduced a new kind of religious space for open-air worship by large indigenous congregations: wide walled atria and small corner posa chapels. Sites such as Tepoztlán, Tlayacapan and Tochimilco preserve them well.

You can drive up to Paso de Cortés, pay a small park fee at the CONANP visitor centre, and walk the viewpoints or the little museum. Iztaccíhuatl is climbed from the La Joya trailhead as a serious high-altitude ascent, best done with a guide and proper acclimatisation.

Popocatépetl is another matter. It is one of the most active volcanoes in North America, closed to climbers since it reawakened in 1994, and its crater is off limits. Emissions still dust nearby towns with ash and, in May 2023, briefly closed Mexico City's airports. Come to watch it and to respect the people for whom it is family, not to conquer it.