The Wixárika Route to Wirikuta, World Heritage since 2025: its 20 sacred sites and Durango's Huaxa Manaka

On Saturday, July 12, 2025, at the 47th session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris, Mexico won the inscription of the Wixárika Route through Sacred Sites to Wirikuta (Tatehuarí Huajuyé) on UNESCO's World Heritage List, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced that day in its bulletin No. 334. INAH describes the route as a "trenza de senderos," a braid of paths, along a 500-kilometer biocultural corridor through Nayarit, Durango, Jalisco, Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí. One of its 20 sacred sites, Huaxa Manaka, is in Durango, our home state.

What was inscribed

UNESCO inscribed the route as a serial property, a single listing made up of separate sites, according to INAH. It cited two cultural criteria: criterion (iii), as one of the most representative pre-Columbian routes still in use in the Americas and an exceptional testimony to the living traditions of the Wixárika people, and criterion (vi), because the sacred sites express the bond between culture and the natural world in Wixárika spiritual practice.

Announcing it, Mexico's Secretary of Culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, said it was the first time in all of Latin America that a cultural expression linked to a living Indigenous tradition had received this international recognition. INAH counted it as Mexico's 36th World Heritage inscription and said the country remained first in the Americas and seventh in the world by number of listed properties.

The 20 sacred sites

INAH describes the listed sites as places and landscapes of sacred importance, linked to the spiritual, ritual and cultural practices of the Wixárika people, and says they were chosen together with the Wixárika Council of Elders. Its bulletin names them by state:

The route begins in the south of the Sierra Madre Occidental, which INAH also calls the Sierra Wixárika, the heart of the Wixárika ancestral lands. It continues northeast to the sacred site of Wirikuta, in the Chihuahuan Desert, and ends in the opposite direction, at sacred sites on the coast of Nayarit and at Cerro Gordo, Durango. Together, the components cross three major ecological regions. INAH calls the sacred road "El Camino de Nuestro Abuelo Fuego," the Road of Our Grandfather Fire, or "Tatehuarí Huajuyé."

Along it, INAH says, the Wixaritari carry out a cycle of rituals to keep up their relations with natural elements they regard as ancestral deities, to secure a successful farming cycle in the milpa, the maize field, and the well-being of their people.

Why the Wixaritari sought the listing

INAH says the inscription answers a request the Wixaritari had made for decades. Speaking in Paris, Totupica Candelario Robles, representative of the Consejo Regional Wixárika, said the nomination was prepared in response to the risks of recent decades: population growth, the spread of agricultural and industrial projects, mining concessions and the decline of hikuri, or peyote, in San Luis Potosí. The community, INAH added, regards the inscription as a tool for its culture's survival, because it is the highest legal protection its heritage can have in international law.

The bulletin also lists the protection the route already had under Mexican law: the Plan de Justicia de los Pueblos Wixárika, Na'ayeri, O'dam y Meshikan of 2022, and a 2023 decree that recognizes, protects, preserves and safeguards those peoples' sacred places and pilgrimage routes, and that set up a Presidential Commission to see it carried out.

What has happened since

The route remains on the list. On October 31, 2026, the Sistema de Información Cultural of Mexico's culture ministry counted 36 World Heritage properties in Mexico, among them the "Ruta Wixárika por Sitios Sagrados hasta Wirikuta (Tatehuarí Huajuyé)," which it files under Nayarit.

On September 23, 2026, INAH's director of World Heritage, Francisco Vidargas Acosta, presented the process that led to the inscription at the 63rd regular session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the culture ministry said on October 2. He said the nomination file took nearly three decades to be agreed and accepted by the Wixaritari, who walk more than 500 kilometers each year to commune with their gods at specific points on the coast and in the semi-desert. INAH's support began in 2003, and the final file went to the World Heritage Centre in 2023.

Among the factors that put the pilgrimage to Wirikuta at risk, the release lists urban expansion, inappropriate tourism, disrespectful consumption of peyote, restricted access across private property and, above all, extractive activities such as mining. Vidargas also pointed to the 2024 reform of article 2 of the Constitution on Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples, and said a new general law on their rights was being drafted to put that article into effect.

What it means for travelers

Neither INAH's bulletin nor the culture ministry's release gives visiting hours, fees or access rules for the 20 sites, which both describe as places where the Wixaritari practice their rituals. What the culture ministry's release does say is that inappropriate tourism and disrespectful peyote use are among the threats to the pilgrimage, and UNESCO's description of the property counts inappropriate tourism and peyote consumption among the factors that leave its sites potentially vulnerable.

Durango is also on the World Heritage List through the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the old Silver Route, on which INAH counts 19 sites in Durango, more than in any other state. Our Durango city guide covers the state capital.