El Triunfo

I first saw El Triunfo from the highway at about eighty kilometers an hour and initially concluded I was imagining things. We were two hours south of La Paz, driving toward Los Cabos, and the landscape had settled into the particular hypnotic rhythm of the Baja sierra — cardon cactus in every direction, the road cutting through dry washes, the mountains going brown and purple at the edges. And then Lia said, “Are those chimneys?” and I looked left and there they were: four or five tall brick columns rising from a cluster of low buildings in the middle of the desert, as specific and improbable as something you’d find in a dream about England that kept getting the geography wrong.

We pulled off at the next opportunity and came back. That detour became two hours, and I’ve thought about El Triunfo regularly since.

The approach is along a short paved road that drops you into the town from above, which means your first proper view is of the whole settlement at once: the chimneys, the church on its small rise, the old hacienda buildings in various states of restoration and ruin, and the desert pressing in from every side. The afternoon light had started to go warm and orange, and the brick of the chimneys was picking it up, going the color of terracotta, of old Castilian clay, of something that had no business being here in the Baja peninsula at all.

The History of a Boom That Ended

El Triunfo was founded in the 1860s following a silver and gold strike in the sierra, and for the last three decades of the nineteenth century it was the largest and wealthiest city in Baja California Sur — larger than La Paz, larger than Cabo San Lucas, which at that point was a minor fishing village. German and English mining engineers came down with their capital and their architectural ambitions, and what they built looks like what you’d build if you were trying to recreate a provincial European town in a place where the temperature hits forty degrees in summer: a church, a municipal building, a company store, a theatre. The theatre — the opera house — is the one that gets you.

The smelting operation was enormous. The chimneys are the remnant of the furnace complex, and they’re taller than they look from the highway. Standing next to one of them, I had to crane my neck. They’re solid brick, well-made, the mortar still largely intact after 130 years of Baja sun. Inside one there’s a nest — something, a bird of some kind, had tucked dry grass into a gap high up where the mortar had cracked. I stood there for a long time looking at the light coming through that gap and listening to a cactus wren somewhere nearby in the scrub, its call a kind of mechanical ratchet, and the silence between calls was the deepest silence I have encountered in a very long time.

France has ghost towns. The ones in the north that were evacuated during the First World War and never resettled — Fleury-devant-Douaumont, Haumont-près-Samogneux — have that quality of places removed from time by catastrophe. El Triunfo was removed from time by economics, which is a quieter kind of disappearance. The silver ran out. The company left. The population dropped from eight or ten thousand people to a few hundred and kept dropping. Now there are perhaps three hundred residents. The church still has services. The café is open. The opera house has been there for 130 years with no particular plans.

The opera house is the most disorienting thing. It’s a two-story structure with decorative brick detailing, arched windows, the remnant of what might once have been a painted frieze under the eaves. It’s not open to the public — it’s not structurally safe — but you can walk around it and look through the gaps where windows used to be. I did this with a particular kind of focus. In 1890, somebody made the decision to build an opera house here, in the Baja California desert, for an audience of silver miners and their families and the engineering staff who managed them. Wagner was fashionable in Europe. There were Verdi revivals happening in Mexico City. Whether any of that reached El Triunfo’s stage specifically, I don’t know, but the building exists, so the aspiration existed. That aspiration is the part I keep returning to.

Lia, when we rounded the corner and first saw the full facade, stopped walking. After a moment she said, “Someone really believed this place had a future.” She said it without irony, which is the right way to say it.

The Town That Remains

El Triunfo today has one proper café — El Minero — which serves coffee and sandwiches and, when the kitchen is in the mood, a simple lunch. I had a coffee there that was better than it needed to be and a plate of beans and tortillas that was exactly what it needed to be. The owner, or the person who appeared to be the owner, asked where we’d come from. When I said France originally, now Mexico City, he nodded as if this explained something. Several of El Triunfo’s original engineers had been French, he mentioned, though he couldn’t say which buildings they’d specifically contributed to.

There’s a small museum — the Museo de El Triunfo — in the old company building, and it’s worth an hour. The photographs of the mining operation in full swing are extraordinary: the smelter working, the chimneys smoking, the streets full of people and mule carts, the whole apparatus of extraction in action. Looking at those photographs and then walking back outside to the present-day silence creates a vertiginous feeling, the sensation of two timelines briefly visible at once.

The desert reasserts itself constantly. Between the old buildings, the cardon cacti have had 130 years to move back in, and in places they stand against the old brick walls like they’re waiting for a decision. The road through town is still paved but narrow, and there are cats everywhere — the descendant colony of cats that has been in Mexican towns since the Aztecs, possibly longer, managing the mice in the granaries that no longer exist.

In the late afternoon, when the light goes completely warm and the mountains east of town go dark purple and the chimneys glow, you understand why someone might have found this place beautiful enough to build an opera house in. The sierra here is not the barren desolation of a bad Western. The cardon are magnificent — some of them eight or nine meters tall, their columns catching the low light, their shadows long on the ground. The birds are numerous and loud. A pair of turkey vultures was circling something in the next canyon over, unhurriedly, in the way that turkey vultures always seem to be doing exactly what they were always going to do.

We stayed until the light failed. I would have stayed longer.

Getting There, Where to Stay, When to Go

Getting there: El Triunfo is approximately 165 kilometers southeast of La Paz on Federal Highway 1 (Mex-1), the main Baja peninsula road. The drive from La Paz takes around two hours depending on your pace; the highway is in reasonable condition and the route is straightforward. It works well as a day trip from La Paz, or as a stop on a longer drive south toward Los Cabos — La Paz to El Triunfo to Todos Santos or Los Barriles is a natural route.

Where to stay: There are no hotels in El Triunfo itself. La Paz is the logical base — it’s a proper city with a good range of accommodation and a malecon worth walking. If you’re continuing south, Todos Santos (an hour west of the Los Cabos highway junction) has excellent boutique options and is a worthwhile overnight in its own right.

When to go: The desert sierra is most comfortable from October through April, when temperatures are mild and the afternoons have that particular golden quality that flatters the brick. Summer visits are possible but the heat is significant — arrive early morning and leave by early afternoon if you’re visiting between June and September.

What to bring: Water, obviously — there’s only one café and no shops to speak of. A camera, for reasons that will be obvious within five minutes of arriving. Some tolerance for the silence, which is either restful or unsettling depending on what you bring to it.