Valle de Bravo

The lake. An artificial reservoir created in the 1940s, now covered in sailing boats, kayaks and small pleasure craft; the waterfront is where the town's restaurants are and boat operators sell trips by the hour from the docks. Paragliding. Valle is one of the better-known flying sites in the Americas: tandem flights from the Peñón ridge run year-round with local schools, and the town fills with pilots for competitions.

The town itself — cobbled streets, white walls with red-tiled roofs, an eighteenth-century church, and a market that is at its fullest at weekends. Walks and waterfalls: the Velo de Novia falls and the pine ridges around the lake, which are the reason the air here feels like a different country from the valley of Mexico.

The monarch butterfly overwintering colonies of Michoacán and the State of Mexico are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the accessible reserves — Piedra Herrada is the nearest to Valle, with El Rosario and Sierra Chincua further into Michoacán — hold tens of millions of butterflies in the oyamel firs between roughly November and March, with February usually the peak.

Practicalities that matter: the reserves are at 2,700 to 3,300 metres, so the walk up is real work even for people acclimatised to the city's 2,240 m; horses are available at most entrances; and the butterflies fly when the sun warms them, so late morning is the hour. Reserve entry fees are set by the local communities that run them and are not published centrally, so we do not print a figure.

From Mexico City this is a two-day undertaking rather than a day trip, and Valle de Bravo is the comfortable base for it — which is the strongest single argument for the town on this page.

By car it is about 2 hours 30 on a good day via the Toluca motorway, and considerably more on a Friday evening or a Sunday afternoon, when half the city is doing the same thing. Coaches run from Terminal Poniente (Observatorio); operators publish fares at the counter rather than in a form we could read.

In the town itself everything is walkable, steeply. Boat operators and paragliding schools are on the waterfront and on the road up to the ridge; the butterfly reserves need a car or a tour from the town.

Five hours of driving out of a twelve-hour day leaves about six hours in Valle, and the town's appeal is precisely the things that need longer: a morning on the water, an evening on the waterfront, a walk in the pines. Every other destination in this guide gives more back per hour of road.

So: on a first visit of four or five days, skip it — Teotihuacán and Puebla are the day trips. On a longer stay, or if you are in Mexico City for a fortnight and want a weekend that is not urban, this is what residents themselves do. The day-trips page compares them all.

If you are in Mexico City for four or five days, this page is here to tell you to skip it: Teotihuacán and Puebla are the day trips that repay the road. If you are here for two weeks, or working remotely, a weekend at the lake is what residents do — and between November and March it is also the way to see the monarchs.

The day-trips page sets them all against each other, and the city itself is on the Mexico City city guide.