Colima: Volcanoes that shape the country offer fiery view into the nature of the place
Mexico had been a vital stamp missing from my lava-lover’s passport.
I confess to being fascinated by smoldering summits and the tortured landscapes their eruptions leave behind, a captivation that has lured me to distant corners of the globe. I had experienced places through their ancient and angry geology. Except Mexico. A trip to Guadalajara, however, landed me within a day’s drive of several noteworthy peaks, including 12,631-foot Volcan de Fuego, the active summit at a 3-mile-wide caldera known as the Colima volcano complex.
Rather than stay in the nearby somnolent town of Colima, for two nights we splurged on the Hacienda de San Antonio, a 25-room lodge in a fertile valley above Colima, 7 miles from Fuego’s rim. Clouds obscured the volcano when we drove into the hacienda’s courtyard, but late at night I peeked out the window to see the sky had cleared — and Fuego’s black outline loomed above.
On the road to the trailhead the next morning, Fuego came into view and, not a minute later, a plume of smoke and ash erupted into the clear air.
“That’s not an eruption,” Joaquin, one of our two guides, said calmly. “It was an exhalation — the volcano just needs to relieve some pressure.” Small comfort. More than most countries, Mexico has been shaped by upheaval from beneath the Earth’s relatively thin skin. Volcanoes have been — and still are — part of daily life in towns and villages such as Colima. The last major eruption at Fuego was in 1913, an event that resulted in pyroclastic flows and fatalities.
But since the 1960s, Fuego has been regularly active — fertilizer for Colima’s agricultural bounty (and catnip for volcano buffs such as me), but daunting enough that a monitoring station sits on a shoulder of the extinct neighboring summit, Volcan de Nevado Colima. A well-maintained dirt road switchbacks through pine forest to the 11,500-foot level; from here, a 3-mile (round trip) trail ascends to the observatory, at 13,125 feet.
Amid scattered clouds, we gazed across and down at Fuego’s maw, less than 2 miles away. It did not exhale again, that we saw. It didn’t matter — the view into Mother Nature’s Mexican kitchen was enough. Passport stamped. Lodging, dining: There are hotel options in Colima, 14 miles from Fuego, but we stayed at the romantic Hacienda de San Antonio, a 5,000-acre property that produces most of its own meat and organic produce for fine meals. Doubles from $540; haciendadesanantonio.com.