Current Time in Gómez Palacio, Mexico

Gomez Palacio stands in the north-east of the Mexican state of Durango, on the banks of the Nazas River in the desert basin known as the Comarca Lagunera. Together with Torreon across the state line in Coahuila and neighbouring Lerdo it forms a metropolitan area of well over a million and a half people, one of the largest in northern Mexico. The city itself has around four hundred thousand inhabitants.

The Laguna region owes its existence to irrigation. The Nazas once emptied into a shallow inland lake, and in the second half of the nineteenth century engineers and landowners built canals to spread its water across the desert, creating an agricultural boom in cotton. When the Central Mexican Railway arrived in the 1880s a settlement grew at the junction and was named after Francisco Gomez Palacio, a Durango politician and jurist. Cotton gins, a great soap and oil works that processed cottonseed, flour mills and metalworking shops turned the town into an industrial centre within a generation, and the region became one of the most modern and turbulent parts of Porfirian Mexico. The Laguna was a stronghold of revolutionary armies after 1910 and later the site of one of the country's largest land reform programmes.

Cotton has since given way to dairy farming and industry. Gomez Palacio is the headquarters of Mexico's largest dairy company, whose milk, cheese and yoghurt are sold throughout the Americas, and its industrial parks house food processing, chemicals, metallurgy, plastics and a substantial number of assembly plants producing for export. Together with Torreon it forms one of the country's key manufacturing and logistics hubs, well placed on the highways linking Monterrey, Chihuahua, Durango and the border.

The city has a pleasant, unpretentious character. Central plazas, the parish church, the Victoria park with its lakes and playgrounds, sports facilities and a lively food scene of gorditas, asado and regional sweets shape everyday life. Baseball and football are followed passionately across the metropolitan area, and the Laguna's distinctive music and dance traditions are celebrated at regional fairs.

The surrounding desert offers striking excursions. The Canon de Fernandez protected area on the Nazas has cliffs, riverside woodland and birdlife, while further north lies the Mapimi Biosphere Reserve, an important desert ecosystem where rare tortoises are protected. The same area contains the so-called Zone of Silence, a stretch of desert surrounded by stories of radio interference and meteorite falls that has drawn curious visitors for decades.

Highways connect the city in every direction, the airport serving the metropolitan area lies nearby in Torreon, and campuses of the Juarez University of the State of Durango, technological institutes and private universities provide higher education.

Industrious and firmly rooted in the desert, Gomez Palacio is a good example of how northern Mexico built prosperity out of water, railways and hard work.