Wixárika Pilgrimage Route Earns UNESCO World Heritage Status

Last month marked a historic victory for the Wixárika people of Mexico, and by extension for Indigenous communities across the Americas. On July 12, 2025, the sacred pilgrimage route of the Wixárika was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List following a unanimous decision at the 47th session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris, France, becoming the first such recognition for a living Indigenous culture in Latin America. 

The Wixárika, more commonly known by their Spanish name, the Huicholes, are an Indigenous group of approximately 60,000 who inhabit the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range in northwestern Mexico. One of the oldest known cultures with a living peyote tradition, they annually embark on a several-hundred-mile pilgrimage, tracing the journey of their deities and the ancestors from the sea to the holy place of Wirikuta in San Luis Potosí, leaving ritual offerings on sacred sites along the way.

The inscription comes at a time when Indigenous communities globally are demanding stronger recognition of their land rights as a means of climate action and cultural survival. For the Wixárika, UNESCO status offers not only symbolic recognition but a potential tool for legal leverage in defending sacred territories against extractivist industries. Similar protections have halted mining activity adjacent to Aboriginal territory in Kakadu National Park in Australia and blocked logging, mining, and hydroelectric dams from expanding into Pimachiowin Aki, Canada, part of the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg.

Known as the Wixárika Route through Sacred Sites to Wirikuta or Tatehuarí Huajuyé (The Path of Our Grandfather Fire), the ancestral pilgrimage is considered one of the most representative pre-Columbian routes still in use in the Americas. Stretching across five states in north-central Mexico, including Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Durango, and San Luis Potosí, it comprises a zigzagging braid of trails that spans the five cardinal points of Wixárika cosmology, including over 20 sacred sites. 

The annual pilgrimage is a cyclical, living tradition and a rich cultural system that transmits ancestral knowledge and wisdom to new generations. To walk the sacred path to Wirikuta, known as the birthplace of the sun, is to relive the Wixárika creation story itself, renewing the cycles of life once more. Pilgrims follow the paths of their deities and ancestors, such as Tatewari, Grandfather Fire, Nacawé, the Rain Goddess, and Tamatsí Kauyumarie, Our Elder Brother Blue Deer, who sacrificed himself as food for the people and in whose tracks, peyote, or hikuri, grows.

“For us, the pilgrimage along the Wixárika route is very important,” says Felipe Serio Chino, a Wixárika community member from Tuxpan de Bolaños and president of the nonprofit Tatewari Intervención Wixárika. “It is an ancestral heritage, a ceremonial act of life, because for us, year after year, the meaning of the route is to renew the candles of the world, to renew the world with our prayers to Wirikuta.”

Far more than a psychedelic cactus, hikuri, is considered a deity, sustaining the Wixárika’s spiritual cosmology, cultural identity, and connecting them to their ancestors and gods.

From the Wixárika perspective, the importance of these ancient rites transcends the personal into the collective, essential for the continued existence of humanity as a whole. Each year, their pilgrimage, alongside the offerings and ceremonies held along the way, becomes a renewed prayer for good rainfall, bountiful crops, the sustained health of the climate, and the balance that sustains both human and more-than-human life. 

The decision to inscribe the pilgrimage route on the UNESCO World Heritage List is undoubtedly cause for celebration, marking the culmination of a determined 30-year struggle. Yet this milestone is only one chapter in a longer fight for territory and sovereignty. 

The Wixárika people and their spiritual-biocultural heritage have faced existential threats for centuries. It started with the violent colonization that began with the Spanish conquest and extends to more recent pressures, such as mining concessions, agribusiness expansion into the sacred lands of Wirikuta, the rise of psychedelic tourism and peyote poaching, and the growing presence of drug cartels in Wixárika territory.

This past August, the desert town of Estación Wadley in the sacred territory of Wirikuta saw community members gathered to chart ways of defending their land and water from the advance of large-scale chili and tomato production, which is already draining the Vanegas–Catorce aquifer and endangering both peyote and the wider ecosystem.

Residents held an informational meeting on August 16 about land rights and the aquifer’s condition, declaring that “Wadley is not for sale.” Through petitions and collective action, they are demanding immediate intervention from authorities. Despite UNESCO recognition of Wirikuta as sacred territory, the region remains under threat, with the Mexican National Water Commission (CONAGUA) reporting in 2024 that over 7 billion litres of water are already being overextracted annually.

“Our people hope that this inscription becomes yet another tool for the protection of our sacred territories, allowing us to eradicate the extractivist and agroindustrial threats that harm our lands and culture,” the Wixárika Regional Council shared in a statement.

The route’s candidacy, originally nominated by the Wixárika Regional Council for the Defense of Wirikuta, was developed in collaboration with the non-profit Conservación Humana, which spent years building the case for its cultural value, ultimately persuading Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) to submit it for consideration by the World Heritage Directorate.

Efforts to secure recognition began in the 1990s, when San Luis Potosí designated part of Wirikuta a Site of Cultural and Historic Heritage and an Area under Ecological Conservation in 1994, and later decreed it a Sacred Natural Site in 2001. These state-level protections were never matched federally, however, and the Mexican government continued to sell land and grant mining concessions.

Throughout the process, mining companies have mounted considerable resistance, viewing the inscription as a threat to their interests. The situation has been further complicated by changes in Mexican legislation that enable the privatization of communal lands once held collectively by ejidatarios (members of communal land holdings), opening the door to greater incursions by mining interests and large-scale agribusiness.

In response, members of the Wixárika Regional Council have filed injunctions (amparos) to revoke at least 78 mining concessions, arguing that such projects cause irreparable environmental harm and threaten both their cultural heritage and the surrounding ecologies. Yet, the courts have so far failed to meaningfully address these legal actions.

This inscription follows earlier efforts such as the 2022 Plan for Justice and the 2023 Presidential Commission. In April 2022, 200 Wixárika from Jalisco and Nayarit marched over 1,000 kilometres to the National Palace, demanding the restitution of 11,000 hectares stolen over a century ago and sold illegally to ranchers. Despite court rulings in their favor, the federal government has yet to act. Born of direct dialogue between Indigenous leaders and the federal government, the Plan for Justice names sacred sites, culture, land rights, governance, and basic services among the community’s most urgent priorities.

In 2003, the United Nations adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, designed to protect practices, skills, and expressions of ancestral knowledge. Some heritage experts argued that the Wixárika should seek inscription under this framework instead of the World Heritage List, which already recognizes many Indigenous cultural traditions worldwide. But as INAH director Diego Prieto Hernández insisted, the spiritual traditions cannot be separated from the land that sustains them.

“How can we preserve the taco if we have no maize?” he said during a press conference at the Museo Nacional de Antropología. “How can we preserve the music if we have no wood to make the guitars? How can we preserve the pilgrimage if we do not have the territory to walk through — the mountains, the canyons, all of it?”

Wixárika lawyer and land defender Santos de la Cruz Carillo agreed. “The inclusion under the Convention for the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage is an achievement, because it would in some way protect the material aspects: the flora, fauna, and all the elements within the habitat and ecosystem of this sacred place.”

Beyond Wirikuta, several parts of the pilgrimage route did not make it into the UNESCO inscription, as well as stretches of land on private properties where the owners permit the Wixárika to pass through and perform their ceremonies, such as at Cerro Gordo in Durango.

Going forward, UNESCO’s recommendations call for prohibiting and mitigating mining, limiting urban expansion, appointing site managers, and creating a “culturally-appropriate” sustainable tourism strategy. In order to avoid risks associated with destructive development, Andrés Morales, UNESCO Representative in Mexico, stressed that this must be an Indigenous-led process, “strengthen[ing] mechanisms for Wixárika community participation in decision-making and site management. This is central and non-negotiable for the proper management of the pilgrimage route.”

The World Heritage inscription obliges the Mexican state to protect the site’s “Outstanding Universal Value” through legal and management measures. In practice, this can lead to stronger environmental protections, increased international oversight, and eligibility for conservation funding, though these outcomes depend heavily on political will.

Maurilio Ramírez Aguilar, General Coordinator of the Wixárika Regional Council, emphasized, “While this recognition is certainly historic for our country, our peoples will not abandon the demands for the protection and conservation of our territories, since the extractivist and agro-industrial threats that put our land, and our survival as an Indigenous people, at risk remain.”

This inscription is a step toward safeguarding sacred sites so that the Wixárika can maintain their cultural tradition and sovereignty. For the Wixárika, as with many other Indigenous cultures, their spiritual practices are inextricably interwoven with the physical territories that give them life. When sacred lands are under threat, so too is the heart of their culture.

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