Nevado de Toluca

The Nevado de Toluca, Xinantécatl in Nahuatl, forms part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt: its western and northern flanks descend towards the Toluca valley and its southern and south-western flanks towards the basin of the river Balsas. It is Mexico's fourth largest volcano, built up by successive layers of lava, and culminates in an elliptical crater inside which lie two high-altitude lakes, the Lake of the Sun and the Lake of the Moon, one of the few places in the country where it is possible to drive almost to the crater rim.

Its biological significance comes from the convergence of the Nearctic and Neotropical regions, which favours a high diversity of ecosystems and species. The sacred fir, pine and oak forests of its slopes also perform a critical hydrological function: they are the catchment area for the Toluca valley aquifer and for several important streams.

Its legal history is one of the most disputed in Mexican conservation. It was decreed a National Park on 25 January 1936 by Lázaro Cárdenas, and amended in 1937 to establish a forest reserve inside it, but the decree was applied over ejidos whose expropriation was never paid for, and in later decades the state itself granted land to more ejidos inside the park. That contradiction between the national park designation and the existence of villages and farmland within it led the government to recategorise it in 2013 as a Flora and Fauna Protection Area, a more permissive category that allows productive activities by the farming communities. The decision remains controversial: its defenders present it as a realistic recognition of the rights of 54 communities, and its critics maintain that the deterioration data used to justify it were partial and that the management programme opens to forestry areas that were being conserved.