Mexican mountains offer spectacular hikes to see monarch butterflies

If you’d rather see butterflies on a mountaintop than slather yourself with sunblock on a tourist-packed beach in Cancun, Mexico is an ideal winter destination.

Ecotourism is drawing fans in the central states of Michoacan and Mexico, thanks to the spectacular yearly migration of millions of orange-and-black-winged monarch butterflies.

In delicate swarms, the butterflies head south from the U.S. and Canada to Mexico, where they drip from pine trees and coat mountainsides from November to late March. They gather in such astonishing numbers that cars passing the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve sometimes have to slow to speeds of only a few kilometres an hour to avoid splattering the delicate creatures on the windshield as they fly across the road.”*

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