Mineral de Pozos

I came on a Tuesday in February, when the light hits the meseta at a low angle all day and turns the ruins a color somewhere between rust and gold. The bus from San Luis de la Paz dropped me at the edge of the zócalo just after noon. There were maybe three other people in the square. A dog was asleep against the church steps. I stood for a moment wondering if I had gotten off at the wrong stop, then a man came out of a doorway carrying a canvas and I understood I was in the right place.

Ruins and the People Who Paint Them

Pozos — locals almost never say the full name — was a mining boomtown in the late 1800s and was almost completely abandoned by the 1950s. The mines that produced silver, copper, and a brief fever of speculation now stand open to the sky, their stone walls still intact enough to walk through but wild enough that cacti grow through the floors. I spent an afternoon in the Hacienda de Cinco Señores ruins, where a photographer from Mexico City had set up a small exhibition in one of the roofless chambers, prints clipped to string between the walls. It was the strangest gallery I have been to. The light came in differently every twenty minutes. Two painters working nearby told me they came every dry season because, they said, nowhere else in Mexico gives you this quality of afternoon diffusion. I did not argue. It is the kind of ruin that makes you want to make something rather than just look.

Mezcal in a Ghost Town

The town’s small commercial strip along Calle Zaragoza holds a handful of galleries, a couple of guesthouses, and two or three places that sell mezcal from the region. I stopped into one whose name I never caught — painted wood sign, three tables, a man behind a counter — and spent longer than I intended working through small pours of a tobalá from Guanajuato state. The owner explained that Pozos had been legally dead, not just abandoned: it was officially depopulated for decades before people started coming back in the 1990s, first a few artists, then slowly more. The mezcal was smoky in a restrained way, nothing showy. We talked through the afternoon while the light outside shifted.

The Sunday Market

On weekends a small tianguis spreads across the zócalo — local ceramics, dried herbs from the desert, the occasional piece of silver jewelry made in town. It is not a market for tourists in the way San Miguel’s Mercado de Artesanías is; the vendors are mostly local and the prices reflect that. I bought a small clay whistle shaped like a dog, the kind made with pre-Hispanic techniques that a handful of artisans in the area have revived. It cost forty pesos. I have carried it since.

Getting There

The easiest approach is a bus to San Luis de la Paz from San Miguel de Allende (roughly 90 minutes), then a local colectivo or taxi the remaining 20 kilometers to Pozos. Some people drive from San Miguel directly — about an hour on federal highway 57D toward Querétaro, then state roads north. There is no bus station in Pozos itself; confirm your return options before you go.