Sierra de San Pedro Mártir

Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park was decreed in 1947 in the state of Baja California and protects the highest massif on the peninsula, which culminates in the Picacho del Diablo, above 3,000 metres. It is a granite batholith that rises abruptly above the desert on its eastern flank, with an escarpment of more than two thousand metres over the San Felipe valley, and descends more gently towards the Pacific.

The altitude creates an island of conifer forest — pine, incense cedar and fir — in the middle of an arid setting, an environment that is the southern continuation of the forests of the mountains of southern California and that is home to montane wildlife such as bighorn sheep, mule deer and puma. Its isolation and the sparse population of the peninsula give the range one of the darkest and most stable night skies in North America, which is why it houses the National Astronomical Observatory of the UNAM, one of the most important in Mexico.

Since the beginning of this century the park has been the setting of one of the country's most ambitious conservation projects: the reintroduction of the California condor, the largest flying bird in North America, extinct in Mexico by the mid-twentieth century. Birds bred in captivity in the United States are released here in a binational programme that has managed to establish a free-flying population and to record breeding in the wild, although the species still depends on intensive management, above all because of lead poisoning from ammunition.