Villa Victoria

The first time I drove to Villa Victoria the fog was so thick I nearly turned back. It was early, and the road west of Toluca climbed into pine forest where the mist hung between the trunks and the temperature reading in my car kept dropping. Then the trees opened and there was the reservoir — a great sheet of still grey water lying in the highlands, its far shore lost in the mist. I pulled over, got out into air cold enough to sting, and stood there with a thermos of coffee watching the fog slowly lift off the water. I hadn’t expected the scale of it, or the silence.

The Reservoir

The Presa Villa Victoria is a large reservoir, and part of what makes it quietly remarkable is where its water goes: this is one of the sources that helps supply distant Mexico City, pumped and channeled down out of these highlands toward the enormous thirst of the capital. Standing on its shore I found that fact strangely moving — that the water in front of me, ringed by pine and Mazahua farmland, would end up in taps in a megacity two hours and a whole world away.

The reservoir itself is beautiful in an austere, high-country way. No resorts, no jet skis — just the still water, the dark pine forest on the slopes, fishermen in small boats, and the mist that seems to be the region’s default weather. I walked a stretch of the shore that morning and met a man mending a net who told me the fishing had changed over the years with the water levels, which rise and fall with the rains and with how much the city takes. He said it without bitterness, the way you talk about weather.

The Cold Highland and Its Farms

This is high, cold country — pine forest and high-altitude farmland laid across the mountains west of Toluca, some of the chilliest inhabited land in central Mexico. The mornings I’ve spent here have all started the same way: mist in the low fields, frost in the shadows, woodsmoke rising from farmhouse chimneys, everyone moving a little slowly against the cold. The farms grow what will tolerate the altitude and the chill — maize, oats, potatoes, grazing land for sheep.

I love this landscape precisely because it asks something of you. It’s not the warm, easy Mexico of the postcards; it’s a hard-weather highland where people have farmed cold ground for generations. Driving the back roads between hamlets, I passed fields being worked by hand, women in the doorways of modest houses, the pine forest always close on the ridges above. There’s a toughness and a beauty to it that I’ve come to associate with the whole Mazahua sierra.

The Mazahua Town

Villa Victoria is Mazahua country, and the indigenous identity here is strong and lived-in rather than displayed. The town itself is modest — a plaza, a church, a market that’s busiest on its trading day, women in the traditional layered Mazahua dress selling produce and textiles. On my second visit I timed it for the market and spent the morning among the stalls, buying a heavy wool garment against a cold I was completely unprepared for.

I got talking, over a bowl of something hot, to a Mazahua woman who wove the sashes she was selling. She spoke to her daughter in Mazahua and to me in Spanish, switching without thinking, and I asked her about the cold. She laughed and said you get used to it, or you leave. Many do leave — for Toluca, for the capital, for work — and she was proud that her family had stayed on the mountain. The town isn’t pretty in the touristic sense. It’s something better: real, cold, and holding on.

Getting There

From Toluca: about 1 to 1.5 hours by car heading west into the highlands; local buses also run from Toluca toward Villa Victoria. From Mexico City: roughly 2.5 hours by car via Toluca, or a bus to Toluca and a regional connection onward. A car is the most practical way to reach the reservoir shore and the surrounding farm hamlets, which are spread out and not served frequently by transit. Dress seriously for cold — this is one of the chilliest parts of central Mexico, and the mist and wind make it feel colder still. Early mornings by the water, fog and all, are the reason to come.