How to get there
From Mexico City by air about 3/4 hour; by rail via San Luis Potosí; by bus about 10 hours.
The city of Tampico lies on the north bank of the Río Pánuco and, after Veracruz, is the most important port on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It originally grew up as an oil and cotton
port but today it is a well-equipped and busy trans-shipment port for goods from all over the U.S., Europe and South America. The overall appearance of the city and its surroundings is determined by its oil tanks and refineries, bustling port, river estuaries, lagoons and beaches.
History
The area around Tampico was probably settled very early on by the Huastecs, a people speaking a Maya tongue. Evidence of their ceramics, which date back to before 1000 bc, supports this assertion. In the second half of the 15th c. the Aztecs succeeded in making the Huastecs tributary to them.
A river expedition led the first Spaniards here under Alonso Alvárez de Pineda as early as 1519. Within the next ten years the Huastecs were subdued. The Franciscan padre Andrés de Olmos founded a monastery on the ruins of an Aztec settlement in 1532 and it was from here that the city later developed. The monastic settlement, which was called San Luis de Tampico was granted the title "villa" (township) in 1560. During the next hundred years the harbour was the object of many attacks by incursive Indian tribes, such as the Apaches, sweeping down from the north, and pirates coming in from the sea. In 1683 Tampico was destroyed and it was not until 1823, after the War of Independence, that it was rebuilt. In 1829 the town was occupied by the Spanish, who were finally defeated by the Mexican general, later president, Antonio López de Santa Ana. During the Mexican-American War (1846-48) the town was for a time occupied by U.S. troops under General Zachary Taylor. Even French soldiers gained a foothold in Tampico during their country's intervention in Mexico. The discovery of oil near the town at the beginning of the 20th c. under the presidency of Porfirio Díaz brought an influx of U.S. and British capital, and the subsequent boom made Tampico for a time the biggest oil port in the world. Following the nationalisation of the oil companies in 1938 the prosperity of the port temporarily went into a massive decline.
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