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“We sustainably use Rancho Ojo de Agua to showcase the natural resources of the North Coahuila Canyonlands and the lives of its inhabitants - past and present - in order to improve the region environmentally, culturally, and economically.”
Rancho Ojo de Agua is a family-operated ranch located about 30 miles west of Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande across the border from Del Rio, Texas. The ranch is a working cow-calf operation. We raise and market grass-finished beef to south and central-Texas consumers, manufacture and market our exclusive line of Bolsas made from feed sacks, and we offer premium whitetail deer, dove and quail hunting, as well as fishing excursions. Our ranching operation consists of Rancho Ojo de Agua (headquarters) and the nearby Rancho la Chuparrosa, a peninsula on Lake Amistad. |
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Rancho Ojo de Agua and Rancho La Chuparrosa are situated in the North Coahuila Canyonlands, the cradle of North American and Mesoamerican culture. The Lower Pecos River Valley culture flourished near the confluence of the Pecos River and Rio Grande (part of which is the present day Lake Amistad) as far back as 8,000 BC. Early inhabitants painted the oldest rock art in the Americas in the vicinity of Rancho Ojo de Agua, creating the first depictions of both the peyotist "deer-worship" culture later found in Mesoamerica and the "coyote legends" of the American Southwest. For more information on the early inhabitants of this land, visit with our friends at SHUMLA. |
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| The Land The land around Rancho Ojo de Agua and Lake Amistad is an ecological as well as political borderland. The ranch lies at the intersection of the Rio Grande Plains and Tamaulipan mezquital, in the foothills of the high Chihuahuan Desert, and just southwest of the Edwards Plateau. Rainfall from the Sierra del Burro Mountains to the west carves out the canyons that feed into a river with two names: the Rio Bravo or the Rio Grande, depending on which side of the river you find yourself. |
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The Ranch
Located about an hour’s drive from Ciudad Acuña and less than 10 miles away from Lake Amistad and the Rio Grande, Rancho Ojo de Agua has been in the same family for five generations. The ranch house at headquarters is the oldest continuously-occupied structure in this part of Mexico, featuring walls over two feet thick. The ranch operates completely off-grid, with power provided by an on-site generator. Despite the ranch house’s age and relatively remote location, the house includes modern amenities and has recently been fully renovated in a beautiful and comfortable Mexican-hacienda style. |
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 The modern history of Rancho Ojo de Agua begins in 1970 with the arrival of Guillermo "Memo" Canseco after the death of its former owner, his grandmother, Margarita Zambrano de Canseco. The ranch was largely undeveloped prior to Memo’s settling on the ranch, but over the following decades he established a first-class cow-calf operation, producing the finest beef cattle in the region. In 1995, Memo acquired the nearby Rancho La Chuparrosa, a peninsula on Lake Amistad that includes miles of unrivaled lakeside shoreline. Today Memo's family runs Rancho Ojo de Agua and Rancho La Chuparrosa as a unified cow-calf operation, producing a mixture of Hereford, Black Angus, and Charolais calves that are prized in the market for their excellent genetics. |
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Beginning in 1982, Rancho Ojo de Agua established a reputation as home to some of the finest natural whitetail deer in all of Coahuila. Espousing a free-range, fair-chase philosophy without high-fencing or artificial breeding, Rancho Ojo de Agua regularly boasts deer scoring above 170 B&C, including the third-highest scoring deer ever taken in Coahuila in the 2007
season at 193 B&C.  Rancho Ojo de Agua takes pride in the storied history of its region and its own prominent place within that history, and looks forward to the opportunity to share its past and present with you.
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