Popocatepetl
Mexico's smoking mountain, a restless giant beside Mexico City
Mexicans call it El Popo, and on clear mornings its snow-capped summit and trailing plume of smoke can be seen from Mexico City itself, where more than twenty million people live within reach of its ash. Popocatepetl, the second-highest peak in Mexico, has been in a state of restless eruption for over two decades, puffing gas, ash and the occasional incandescent fragment into the sky. Its Nahuatl name means Smoking Mountain, and few volcanoes anywhere combine such grandeur, such cultural depth and such proximity to a megacity.
Popocatepetl rises about 5,450 metres in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, a chain born where the Cocos plate subducts beneath North America. Paired with its dormant neighbour Iztaccihuatl, it forms one of the great sights of the central Mexican highlands. Its current activity, ongoing since 2005, consists mostly of dome-building punctuated by gas-and-ash explosions that occasionally dust nearby towns and disrupt flights into the capital. The greater fear is of a larger Plinian eruption like those preserved in its geological record, which could threaten the densely populated basins on every side.
Popocatepetl looms large in Mexican identity and myth. Aztec legend cast Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl as ill-fated lovers turned to mountains, and the volcano's slopes hold sixteenth-century monasteries now recognised as World Heritage Sites. Civil-protection authorities maintain a colour-coded alert system and evacuation plans for the surrounding states, and scientists keep the volcano under round-the-clock observation. For the millions who glimpse its plume each day, El Popo is at once a familiar landmark, a sacred presence and a sleeping hazard of national scale.