Layout of Torreón
Torreón sits at about 1,120 m in the Comarca Lagunera, the irrigated basin of the lower Río Nazas, in the south-west corner of Coahuila. It is a young city by Mexican standards: a hacienda and a railway siding in the 1880s, a settlement where the Mexican Central and Mexican International lines crossed in 1888, a villa in 1893 and a city only in 1907. The 2020 census counted 720,848 people in the municipality, second in the state to Saltillo, and the metropolitan area it heads holds about 1.43 million.
The plan reflects that late start: a regular grid laid out around the railway rather than a colonial plaza. Avenida Juárez and Avenida Morelos run east–west through the centre, with the Plaza de Armas, the Alameda Zaragoza and the Bosque Venustiano Carranza as the main open spaces, and the Museo Arocena occupying a 1930s building on the main square. The Canal de la Perla, a nineteenth-century irrigation channel that had been buried under the streets, was excavated and reopened as a walkway in 2010. The Cerro de las Noas rises directly west of the centre and carries the Cristo de las Noas. Francisco Sarabia International (TRC) is about 13 km east of the city with domestic flights to Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara and Tijuana, and the bus station is on the eastern side near the ring road.
Distances from Torreón
| Place | km | Time | How |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gómez Palacio, Durango | 8 | 20 min | Bridges over the Río Nazas |
| Torreón airport (TRC) | 13 | 20 min | Taxi |
| Lerdo, Durango | 15 | 25 min | Via Gómez Palacio |
| Parras de la Fuente | 130 | 1 h 30 | MX-40 east |
| Durango | 250 | 2 h 45 | MX-40D west |
| Saltillo | 260 | 2 h 45 | MX-40D east |
| Zacatecas | 340 | 3 h 45 | MX-49 south-east |
| Monterrey | 350 | 3 h 45 | MX-40D via Saltillo |
| Chihuahua | 540 | 5 h 30 | MX-49 and MX-45 north |
| Mexico City | 990 | 10 h 30 | MX-49 and MX-57, overnight bus |
The three Laguna cities and the irrigation district
Torreón is one of three cities that have grown into a single built-up area across a state line. Gómez Palacio, with about 370,000 people, and Lerdo, with about 163,000, both lie in Durango on the north bank of the Río Nazas, minutes away across the bridges; Matamoros, a separate Coahuila municipality of about 120,000, adjoins Torreón to the west. Together they form the metropolitan zone of La Laguna, the ninth-largest in Mexico. The river that divides them is normally dry in the city: the Lázaro Cárdenas dam at El Palmito, completed in 1946 upstream in Durango, and the Francisco Zarco dam below it hold the Nazas back and release its water into canals instead of the old channel. The rivers map traces the Nazas from the Sierra Madre Occidental to its terminal basin at Laguna de Mayrán, which no longer fills.
That water made the region. Irrigation District 017, laid out on the Nazas, turned an alkaline desert basin into Mexico's main cotton-growing area in the first half of the twentieth century, and the agrarian redistribution of 1936 divided the great estates here into ejidos. Cotton has since given ground to forage crops, and the Laguna is now the country's leading milk basin, with large herds fed on lucerne and maize silage and a dairy industry founded in Torreón in the middle of the century. Groundwater over-extraction and arsenic in the deeper aquifer are long-standing problems, and a pipeline scheme drawing treated water from the Francisco Zarco dam was built to reduce dependence on wells.
The city was fought over twice in the Revolution: Pancho Villa's División del Norte took it in 1913 and again, decisively, in the battle of March and April 1914, which opened the route south. In May 1911 more than three hundred Chinese residents were killed here by revolutionary troops and townspeople, one of the worst massacres of the period. Torreón is 500 km from the nearest sea and has no beach; what surrounds it is desert. Beyond the irrigated fields the ground rises into bare limestone ranges, and the road east to Parras de la Fuente, 130 km away, reaches a spring-fed oasis with vineyards working since the sixteenth century. See the northern Mexico map for the wider region and the road map for Highway 40 across it.
Questions about Torreón
Where is Torreón on the map of Mexico?
In the south-west corner of Coahuila, on the Río Nazas at 25.54° N, 103.45° W and about 1,120 m above sea level. It is 260 km west of Saltillo and 250 km east of Durango on Highway 40.
What is the Comarca Lagunera?
The irrigated basin around the lower Río Nazas, shared between Coahuila and Durango. Torreón is its largest city; Gómez Palacio and Lerdo sit across the river in Durango, and the metropolitan area they form holds about 1.43 million people.
How far is Torreón from Monterrey?
About 350 km, three and a half to four hours east on the MX-40D toll road through Saltillo. Torreón has its own airport (TRC) with domestic flights, so most travellers fly rather than drive from Monterrey.
What is the Cristo de las Noas?
A concrete statue of Christ about 22 m tall on the Cerro de las Noas, the hill immediately west of the city centre. It is one of the largest such figures in Latin America and the road up it is the standard viewpoint over the whole Laguna basin.