Hidalgo del Parral

I came into Parral on a second-class bus from Chihuahua city, three and a half hours south, arriving mid-morning when the market stalls along Calle Mercaderes were still loud and the smell of freshly pressed orange juice cut through the diesel. I had booked two nights expecting a quiet stop between Chihuahua and Durango. I stayed four. The city has a way of making you feel like you arrived at exactly the right time, which is a trick only places that are not performing for tourists can pull off.

The Death of Pancho Villa, Told by the Building Itself

On the morning of July 20, 1923, Villa drove his Dodge 70 down Calle Juárez and someone opened fire from the windows of a house near the corner of Gabino Barreda. He died in the car. The building where the shots came from is now the Museo Francisco Villa, and it contains the Dodge — or what remains of it — along with photographs, rifles, and personal effects displayed with the kind of solemn clutter that suggests nobody agreed on curation. That lack of agreement is, I think, the point. The man still provokes argument. I spent an hour there on my first afternoon and came back the next morning because I had questions I wanted to think through in that room. Outside, across the narrow street, you can find the building where Villa was sitting when the shooting started; the original bullet holes have been preserved behind a small plaque that most people walk past without stopping. The old men at the bench near the Plaza Guillermo Baca do not walk past them.

Silver Churches and a Centro That Earns Its Grandeur

The wealth that built Parral came out of the ground — silver, mostly, pulled from the Sierra Madre mines from the seventeenth century onward. The Templo de San José on Plaza Baca is the kind of baroque work that stops you mid-sentence; the facade is carved sandstone, heavily ornate, the color of dried apricot in the late sun. A few blocks away, the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Fátima is smaller and darker inside, votive candles making the air thick. I liked the Palacio Pedro Alvarado, the old mining-baron mansion, for its absurd ambition — someone had money and wanted everyone to know it. The market at Mercado Hidalgo is the practical counterweight to all this grandeur: menudo on weekday mornings, gorditas de chicharrón from a woman who has the same stall every day and seems to need no sign.

The Rio Parral and the Hours Between Things

South of the centro, the Río Parral runs shallow and green between low banks. In the evening people walk the path alongside it — families, teenagers, the occasional man with a very small dog. I sat on a bench near the Puente Rojo one afternoon with a cup of café de olla from a thermos someone was selling and watched the light go orange against the hills. Nothing happened. It was precisely enough.

Getting There

Buses from Chihuahua city (Omnibus de Mexico and Estrella Blanca both cover the route) take between three and four hours and drop you at the central bus terminal on the eastern edge of town — a fifteen-minute walk or a short taxi ride from the centro. From Durango, the same companies run a northbound service through the Sierra, roughly four to five hours depending on the road.