Zimapán

The drive into Zimapán from the south does the work before the town does. You come off the high plateau of Hidalgo — the scrubby, austere landscape of maguey and nopal — and suddenly the road begins to drop into something that wasn’t there a moment ago. The Barranca de Zimapán opens up beneath you, and the scale of it is wrong in the way that only genuine geological drama ever is. I had read the numbers: the canyon walls drop 400 meters. The Tula and San Juan rivers converge at the bottom. What the numbers don’t communicate is the quality of the light on limestone at four in the afternoon, or the silence when I cut the engine and got out and stood at the edge of the road.

I drove down at dusk on purpose. Someone in Pachuca had told me the shadows were the thing — that the canyon walls catch the last light at an angle that turns the limestone pink and gold before the whole gorge goes blue and then dark. They were right, and I was annoyed that I couldn’t figure out who to credit when I told people about it afterward.

The Barranca and the Peña del Aire

The Barranca de Zimapán is the kind of geological spectacle that would draw crowds if it were anywhere near a major tourist corridor. It isn’t, and the absence of organized viewpoints and entrance fees makes it better. The canyon road descends through switchbacks, and at various points you can stop and look down into the gorge where the rivers move as thin threads of green water so far below they seem irrelevant to the scale above them.

The Peña del Aire is a natural stone arch that spans part of the canyon — you approach it on foot from a trail that begins near the road, and the walk takes maybe twenty minutes to reach a vantage point where the arch is visible against the open sky. The name means roughly “rock of the air,” which doesn’t quite capture what it is: a mass of limestone that has no business spanning the gap it spans, hanging there with the insouciance of something that has been doing this for ten thousand years and is not worried about the next ten thousand.

The hawks circle in the canyon at dusk, and because of the depth of the gorge and the elevation of the road, they circle below you. This produces a specific disorientation I hadn’t experienced before and would recommend to anyone.

The Colonial Centro

Zimapán made its money from silver, and the center of the town has the particular confidence of somewhere that was once genuinely important. The main church — the Parroquia de San Juan Bautista, seventeenth-century, with a baroque altarpiece inside that is more elaborate than the modest exterior suggests — is the anchor. The facade is stone, built to last in the way that colonial mining towns built things to last: they had the resources and they knew it.

The interior is better than the outside promises, which is a common condition in Mexican colonial churches and one I have stopped being surprised by. The altarpiece is gilded in the way that Mexican baroque altarpieces are gilded, which is to say in a way that makes French baroque seem restrained. It’s a lot, and it’s correct, and standing in front of it you have a specific thought about the quantity of silver that had to come out of the ground to fund this level of decoration in a town of this size in this canyon.

Near the center there’s a substantial mining company building from the boom years — now repurposed, its stone facade carrying the dignity of an industrial structure that outlasted the industry. I walked around the plaza on a Thursday afternoon and found the town going about its business with a completeness that doesn’t require much from visitors.

The Arco del Sitio aqueduct sits a few kilometers from town: a colonial stone structure built as part of the mining infrastructure, now standing in a scrubby valley with no particular ceremony around it. It is very old and quietly impressive and there is no ticket booth.

Getting There

Zimapán sits in northern Hidalgo, about three hours from Pachuca by road — you come up through Ixmiquilpan and the Mezquital Valley, which is worth the trip on its own. The bus from Pachuca runs regularly and deposits you in the town center. If you’re driving, the canyon road approach from the south is the one to take, and take it late in the day.

One night in the town, an afternoon in the canyon, and a morning exploring the colonial center is the right sequence. The altitude is around 1,700 meters and the evenings are cool even in summer, which after the lowland heat of Hidalgo feels like a correction.