Mexico, located in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico is an incredibly diverse country with everything from towering mountains and steamy jungles to ancient ruins and succulent street snacks. Check out these 20 interesting facts about Mexico!
20 Facts About Mexico and its Sport Culture
General Facts
1. Mexico’s real name is not Mexico. Mexico’s official name is United States of Mexico (Estados Unidos Mexicanos). The country is divided into thirty one states, plus the federal district.
2. Mexican children don’t receive gifts on Christmas Day. Don’t worry though, they do receive gifts. The bigger celebration is on the day of Three Kings on January 6th.
3. Mexico has the oldest university in North America. The National University of Mexico (UNAM) was founded in 1551 by Charles V. of Spain, eighty five years before Harvard.
4. Mexico is home to the world’s smallest volcano - Cuexcomate. This volcano sits just outside of the city of Pueblo and is forty three feet tall, barely a small hill.
5. Mexico is home to the world’s largest pyramid which is the Great Pyramid of Cholula in Mexico. It is also the largest monument ever constructed in the world.
6. The Chihuahua, the world’s smallest dog is named after a state in Mexico.
7. The Pico de Orizaba sits on the border between the Mexican states of Veracruz and Puebla and is the third-highest peak in North America after Denali, also known as Mount McKinley (Alaska, United States) and Mount Logan (Yukon, Canada).
8. Without Guillermo González Camarena, a seventeen year-old Mexican inventor, creator of the color transmission system for televisions called the chromoscopic in 1942, the world would be a lot more black and white.
9. Mexican Juan Pablo used North America’s first printing press in 1539 and went on to create thirty five books with it.
10. Even though there's a variety of lists of the “seven wonders”, the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza are often considered among them. The ruins are what’s left of an ancient Maya ceremonial city on the Yucatan peninsula.
Sports Facts
1. Soccer was brought to Mexico by the British who founded the Orizaba Athletic Club in 1898. The club’s main sport was cricket, and the soccer team was founded in 1901.
2. Mexico’s national football team ranks as one of the best in Latin America as it has qualified for fifteen FIFA World Cups. The country also hosted the World Cup tournament twice, in 1970 and 1986.
3. While soccer dominates the airwaves, baseball is quite a popular sport in Mexico. Mexico has two leagues, a northern and southern league, that play a similar seasonal schedule as Major League Baseball.
4. Mexico has produced over one hundred players into Major League Baseball. Some of them considered sports legends including Fernando Valenzuela, Adrian Gonzalez, Ted Williams and Nomar Garciaparra.
Adrian Gonzalez
5. Mexican athletes have a deep history at the Olympic games, having competed in every Summer Olympics since 1900 and won a combined sixty two medals. Their strongest events have been boxing, track and field, and diving.
6. When Spain colonized Mexico around four hundred years ago, it brought along the sport of bullfighting. The sport has remained one of the most popular in the country ever since. Mexico City boasts the largest bullring in the world, Plaza Mexico.
7. Out of the ranch and animal-handling competitions of Colonial Mexico came the Grand Gala that is today the Charrería. Similar to rodeos in the U.S., the Charreado includes events like cattle roping, horse riding and horse performances, and other skill-based contests and competitions.
8. Fronton is a very popular sport in Mexico. The idea of the game is similar to handball – on a rectangular court players hit a hard ball (usually with their hands) against a main wall (called a fronton, or front wall) and receive points for where it bounces back on the court, while their opponents have to try to return the serve.
9. The Mesoamerican ballgame has been played by Mexicans for over three thousand years and is known as the original Mexican ballgame. The oldest ballcourt ever discovered, dating to around 1400 BC, is at Paso de la Amada in Mexico. The exact rules of the sport are lost, but historians believe that one or two players would play on each side of a stone court. They would use rackets, bats, or even their own bodies to keep a ball, made of solid rubber and weighing over eight pounds, moving across the court. At some point, the Maya added an extra challenge by making the aim to pass the ball through stone rings placed high up on a wall at the ends of the court. In the Mexican state of Sinaloa, a version of the same game is still played, called Ulama.
10. Another uniquely Mexican sport is Lucha Libre, which means "freestyle-wrestling". Lucha Libre is a form of professional wrestling, famous for the colorful masks worn by the Luchadores (wrestlers). Like professional wrestling in the United States (WWE), Lucha Libre is quite a spectacle, with rapid and dramatic maneuvers, a brazen atmosphere, and over-the-top personalities.
