Viesca

I drove west from Torreón into the Coahuilan desert with the expectation of finding an abandoned town. I had read about Viesca in a list of Coahuila’s lesser-known destinations and the description used the phrase “ghost town,” which conjured specific images: empty streets, shuttered facades, the cinematic melancholy of a place that was once something and had stopped being it. I drove for two hours through flat desert with the Sierra Madre visible to the south and southwest as a distant wall.

What I found was more complicated than a ghost town, and more interesting.

The Living Alongside the Empty

Viesca’s main plaza is active. There is a church on the north side that was being used the morning I arrived — I could hear singing from inside, some kind of weekday service. There were women with bags crossing the plaza. There was a tienda open on the corner with a refrigerator visible through the door and a child sitting on a step outside it with a phone. The plaza itself is worn and pleasant, with some old trees providing shade, and the benches were not empty.

The abandoned buildings are everywhere. They are not concentrated in a single district or along a single street — they are distributed through the town in a pattern that reflects, I think, the gradual and uneven nature of the depopulation. A two-story colonial building, its upper floor roofless, its walls intact and streaked with decades of rain, stands next to a house with a recently painted blue door. A block away, three consecutive structures are abandoned; the fourth has a satellite dish on its roof. The transitions are not gradual. The occupied house and the ruin share a wall. Literally, in some cases — the same exterior wall bounds both.

This produces a visual effect that I found genuinely disorienting in a way that the purely abandoned ghost towns I have visited — there are several in Zacatecas and Durango — do not produce. The abandonment in Viesca is not total, which means the occupants have chosen to remain in the company of the ruins, or perhaps they don’t think of it that way at all, which is equally interesting.

The Laguna del Rey

Eight kilometers north of Viesca is the Laguna del Rey, a dry salt flat that was the economic engine of the town’s nineteenth-century prosperity. The salt industry here supplied the mining operations of the region — silver and gold mining uses enormous quantities of salt in the refining process — and Viesca was prosperous enough to build the substantial structures whose ruins you walk through today.

The laguna is now dry, or nearly dry: a white crust of salt on a flat lakebed surrounded by desert scrub, disorienting in its horizontal flatness and its reflective brightness. I drove out there in the midday light, which was probably not the best time given the glare, and stood at the edge of the salt crust looking at the way it distorted the horizon. The white extends in every direction with a consistency that eliminates the normal visual cues for distance. You stop being sure whether the dark line on the far edge is a hill or a tree line or a heat mirage, and then you look at it for a few seconds and it resolves, or doesn’t.

In the Camargue in southern France, there are similar salt flats — the Salins du Midi — used for commercial salt production, still active. They have a particular quality of light too, that white-on-white dazzle that makes you squint even behind sunglasses. The Laguna del Rey is larger and emptier and there is no one there, which makes the scale apparent in a different way.

What the Depopulation Looks Like

I spent most of my time in Viesca just walking. Not toward anything in particular — through streets, around blocks, stopping when something was interesting. The pattern of occupation that reveals itself is this: the main plaza and the streets immediately around it are the most occupied. The further you move from the center, the more abandoned buildings you encounter, until at the edges of the town the street becomes mostly ruins and then desert.

Within the occupied area, though, the mix is constant. The school I walked past — primary school, children visible through the window during what appeared to be a math lesson — had an abandoned building directly across the street, its wooden window frames weathered gray, a cactus growing out of the second-floor window opening. The school had been recently painted a yellow-green. The contrast was stark enough that I stopped and looked at it for a while, trying to understand what it meant that these two things existed in such direct proximity without apparent tension.

Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it means that people who live in a place stop seeing it the way a visitor does, which is both the most obvious and the most interesting thing about living anywhere.

Getting There

Viesca is accessible from Torreón by road — Route 40 west and then a turn south. The drive is about two hours. There are occasional buses from Torreón’s bus terminal, but a car is significantly more useful, particularly for the Laguna del Rey. The town has no tourist infrastructure to speak of: no hotels I could find, one or two places where you can eat something simple. Go as a day trip from Torreón.