Hacienda Cerritos Hot Spring

Hacienda Cerritos Hot Spring is a natural thermal facility in Ixtlán del Río, Nayarit, Mexico, a community of the Pacific coastal state of Nayarit near the Aguas Calientes archaeological zone where the Aztlán archaeological site — believed by some researchers to be the mythical Aztlán, the legendary homeland from which the Aztec people began their southward migration to found Tenochtitlán — preserves the stone ruins of a Postclassic Mesoamerican ceremonial center whose temples and ball courts sit above the warm springs that have attracted human settlement to this volcanic valley since pre-Columbian times. The broader region around Ixtlán del Río is part of the Sierra Madre Occidental volcanic landscape of Nayarit, a state whose Pacific beaches, mountain forests, and indigenous Huichol (Wixáritari) communities create one of western Mexico's most diverse and culturally rich environments, with the Huichol yarn paintings and beadwork among the most distinctive and internationally collected expressions of contemporary indigenous Mexican art. The sodium-bicarbonate thermal spring waters of Hacienda Cerritos offer therapeutic bathing in a region of Mexico where archaeological mystery, indigenous cultural richness, and Pacific coastal beauty combine in a thermal setting whose volcanic geological heritage connects the modern visitor to millennia of human recognition of the healing and spiritual properties of the earth's geothermal energy.