Múzquiz
"The steam rising from the pools in the cold morning air looked like something you'd photograph. Then it looked like something you'd just sit in. I chose correctly."
Northern Coahuila is one of the parts of Mexico that doesn’t get mentioned in conversation about Mexico. When people say “I want to go to Mexico,” they mean the coast, or Mexico City, or the colonial cities, or the Yucatán — not the coal country of the Chihuahuan Desert. I understand this. Múzquiz has no Maya ruins, no brightly painted streets, no Pacific beach. What it has is desert landscape of a specific kind that I find compelling, a piece of indigenous history that is unlike anything else in Mexico, and a set of hot springs that in winter feel like a gift the desert is offering for reasons it hasn’t fully explained.
I drove north from Monclova on a flat desert road for about two and a half hours. The Chihuahuan Desert up here feels different from the Sonoran Desert I know from Baja — drier if that’s possible, more monotone, with a flatness that the isolated volcanic sierras interrupt without breaking. The landscape looks like West Texas because it is geologically the same landscape: the Rio Grande is the only thing between them that has any administrative weight. The coal extraction industry appears at intervals — mine infrastructure, rail lines, a power plant exhaling in the distance — and then disappears back into the desert.
The Kickapoo of El Nacimiento
The Kickapoo Nation is a Great Plains people — originally from around the western Great Lakes, pushed south and west by colonial displacement over centuries. A portion of the Kickapoo community migrated to Mexico in 1852 rather than accept forced relocation to a Kansas reservation, and the Mexican government granted them land near El Nacimiento de los Negros in Coahuila, where some of their descendants still live.
The community at El Nacimiento maintains a distinctive cultural continuity: the Kickapoo language, Kickapoo traditional religion, and a way of life organized around seasonal movement that persists even now, with many families spending part of the year in Texas (where they have dual citizenship) and part in Coahuila. Their houses are traditional bark-construction structures that they build and dismantle with the seasons.
I’m aware that the right response to this is caution about intrusion, and I didn’t visit the community itself. But the Kickapoo presence in this particular corner of Coahuila — Great Plains people in a Chihuahuan Desert landscape, maintaining their identity across two countries and two centuries of pressure against it — is not a footnote. It’s a fact about the place that changes how you read it.
Nacimientos del Río San Antonio
The hot springs are what brought me. The Río San Antonio emerges from a series of spring sources in a limestone canyon east of Múzquiz, and where the springs rise the water temperature is around 35 to 40 degrees — warm but not scalding, the temperature that allows you to stay in the water indefinitely. The canyon is narrow and the walls are pale limestone, and in winter the cold desert air sits above the water while the water itself steams.
I arrived on a December morning when the temperature was 6 degrees outside the water. The steam made the pools atmospheric in a way that no photograph adequately captures — you’re inside the cloud of it, looking out at the limestone walls through a gauze. The pools have been minimally developed: some concrete edges at the main pools, a changing room, a palapa for shade that is unnecessary in December. There was a couple at the first pool when I arrived and they left after an hour and I was alone for the rest of the morning.
In water at 38 degrees in a limestone canyon with steam rising around you and the desert cold just above the surface — this is the specific pleasure of desert hot springs in winter, and it is not achievable any other way. I stayed three hours. My fingers were significantly pruned. I did not care.
The springs themselves vary in temperature as you move along the river — the upstream sources are hotter, the pools where the water has traveled further are cooler, and the river itself is refreshingly cold if you want to alternate. I alternated. The cold river in December was genuinely bracing, in the French hydrotherapy sense that involves a certain amount of internal argument before you commit to the immersion.
Coal Country
Múzquiz and the surrounding municipio of Melchor Múzquiz sit above the most significant coal reserves in Mexico. The Carbonífera de Coahuila basin has been mined since the late nineteenth century and powers a substantial portion of the country’s electricity grid. The town reflects this: it’s a functional industrial town, not particularly interested in aesthetics, with the flat competence of a place built around an extractive economy.
The town itself holds about 55,000 people and has the infrastructure you need: hotels, restaurants, a central market where the food is northern Mexican in the specific Coahuilense variant — cabrito (young goat) appears on menus here in ways it doesn’t in the south, and the machaca is made from beef that has been dried in the local style, which is different from the Chihuahua version in ways I cannot fully articulate but can taste.
Getting There
Múzquiz is about 170 kilometers northwest of Monclova, reachable by highway in roughly two to two and a half hours. Bus service connects to Monclova and Saltillo. The Nacimientos del Río San Antonio springs are about 30 kilometers east of Múzquiz town on a paved road; car is necessary. The springs are busiest in summer — visit in winter if you want the steam-and-cold-air combination that makes them genuinely special, and plan to arrive early in the morning when the cold is most pronounced and the steam is thickest.