Real de Catorce

I drove up from Matehuala on a Thursday afternoon, the desert flattening and then suddenly lurching upward into the Sierra Catorce. The jeep drivers at the tunnel entrance charge a small toll and wave you into the Ogarrio tunnel like it is nothing — one lane, one kilometer and a half, cut straight through the mountain in the 1890s. You turn your headlights on. The other end disappears. When you emerge on the far side, your ears pop, the altitude hits you at 2,750 meters, and Real de Catorce materializes out of the thin air: silver-grey stone, silence, the smell of dust and incense.

The Town That Refused to Completely Die

Real de Catorce peaked somewhere around 1890, when its mines were pulling enough silver to fund a small city’s worth of baroque ambition. Then the mines failed, the population collapsed from fourteen thousand to a few hundred, and the mansions were left to the wind. What remains is one of those accidental achievements: a town too remote to be properly renovated, too beautiful to be ignored entirely. The old bullring — the palenque de gallos — was converted into a kind of civic plaza where horses are still tied up outside and children cut across the empty ring on their way to school. The Templo de la Purísima Concepción anchors the main square; the ex-voto room inside is papered floor-to-ceiling with hand-painted tin tablets left by pilgrims who survived car crashes, illnesses, and other disasters they credit to the church’s celebrated figure of Saint Francis of Assisi. I spent an hour in there reading the small printed testimonies. It was the most honest gallery I have seen in years.

Wirikuta and the Desert Below

The Wixáritari — called Huichol in older Spanish accounts — walk hundreds of kilometers each year from their communities in Jalisco and Nayarit to reach Wirikuta, the sacred desert plateau that spreads out below Real de Catorce toward the east. Hikuri, peyote, grows here, and the pilgrimage is not metaphorical: it is a ceremony, a cosmological act, and it has been happening for longer than the silver town above it has existed. There are guided jeep tours into the desert from town — respectful ones will acknowledge what the land means to the Wixáritari; the less thoughtful ones treat it like a novelty. I went out alone in the early morning, walking the edge of the plateau as the sun came flat across the desert. The silence had texture.

Eating and Staying

The town has maybe a dozen places to eat. Café Azul on Lanza Gorta does a serviceable bowl of caldo de res and the best cup of coffee within the tunnel walls. There are a handful of small hotels and posadas in the old stone buildings — Mesón de la Abundancia is the most atmospheric, though the floors slope in ways that remind you which century it was built. Budget an extra night; the altitude and the light conspire to make you move slowly, which turns out to be the correct pace for this place.

Getting There

From San Luis Potosí city, drive or take a bus to Matehuala (roughly two and a half hours), then continue 25 kilometers to the village of Estación Catorce. From there, jeeps and the occasional private vehicle negotiate the Ogarrio tunnel. Jeep colectivos run regularly on weekends; midweek you may need to charter one or drive yourself. The road above Matehuala is paved but narrow.