Acapulco or Acapulco de Juárez is a port city of the State Guerrero, with the Mexico.

To 400 km of Mexico City to the 16.85° NR, 99.92° O in a semicircular deep bay almost closed, easy of access and whose damping is so sedentary that the boats can remain along the rocks which border the dimension. Its population is estimated at 1,5 million inhabitants.

The city is built on a narrow tape (less than one kilometer), of flat ground, between the coast and the mountains which encircle bay. These last are of a great beauty but cause an exceptionally hot and unhealthy climate. The effort to introduce the breeze of sea by a passage called Abra de San Nicolas had beneficial effects.

History

Acapulco has been known like a crossroads of travellers for at least a millenium. Its name was Nahuatl, meaning “ area of the dense reeds ”.
The first vestiges, metates out of stone and of the ustensils in pottery, would date from the third millennium of our era. Well after, of the sophisticated craftsmen manufactured female figurines " dodues". Certain assumptions find influences Polynesian or Asian of at least 1500 years before the arrival of Christophe Colomb.

Other objects resemble those found on the plates of Mexico. However influenced by civilizations Tarascan, Mixtèques, Zapotèques, and Aztec, sometimes paying them a tribute and attended by their tradesmen, Acapulco was never under their direct control, but remained under the government of cacic buildings until the Spanish conquest.

After having subjected the Aztec ones, Hernán the Cortes sent forwardings to the south to build boats and to find a road with the China. The first explorers set sail since Zacatula, close to what is nowadays Lazaro Cardenas on the coast to 400 km in the western north of Acapulco. By a royal decree dated April 25th 1528, “ Acapulco and its surroundings… where the boats of the south were built… ” passed directly in the hands of the Spanish crown . The voyages of discovery left for the Peru, the Mer of Cortez and the Asia. None turned over through the Pacific Ocean, however, until the " père" Andres de Urdaneta discovered the bearing winds of the northern Pacific, which took it along him and its boat, filled of Chinese treasures, in Acapulco in 1565.

During more than 200 years after that, a vessel of annual trade, known by the English as the Galion of Manila took the sea since Acapulco for Manila and the East. On its return a fair with Acapulco began where the merchants negotiated for the silk cargo, porcelains, ivories and enamelled parts of the galleon.

This annual treasure attracted petty thieves quickly too. In 1579, Francis Drake attacked but did not manage to capture the galleon, but in 1587, with broad of Cabo San Lucas, Thomas Cavendish taken the Santa Anna . The cash alone, 1,2 million in gold coins, severely depressed the Marché of gold in London.

After a fleet of the Netherlands had invaded Acapulco in 1615, the Spaniards rebuilt their fort, that it named Fort San Diego in 1617. Destroyed by an earthquake in 1776, the fort was rebuilt in 1783. The war of independence put an end to the " galleon of Manille" , leaving Acapulco during one century in sleep.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the city was selected like terminus for two railway lines seeking a port of the Pacific - the interoceanic one and the Mexican exchange. The city suffered considerably from the earthquakes from July and August 1909. The port developed much at the XXe century.

One exports there today skins, wood of Cèdre and fruits, as well as the products of the adjacent district of Tabares like the Coton, the Tabac, the Cacao, the Cane sugar, the Maïs, the peas and the Café.

Photographs

• Photographs of Acapulco
• Acapulco: A name more than famous, almost a myth
• Acapulco

Simple: Acapulco