Villa de Cos

I took the second-class bus from Zacatecas city on a Thursday morning and arrived in Villa de Cos around noon, when the sun on the plaza was the kind that makes you want to press yourself flat against the shaded wall of the presidencia. The town is small, functional, not performing anything for anyone. There is a church, a market corridor, a handful of comedores with hand-painted signs. I ate a bowl of caldo de res and watched a man argue with a dog over a tortilla for ten minutes. I already liked it here.

The Altiplano and Its Petroglyphs

What brings people out this far — though not many people, which is the point — is the semi-desert itself. The landscape around Villa de Cos is classified as a transition zone between the Chihuahuan Desert and the highlands, which in practice means scrub, lechuguilla, and horizons that go on longer than seems reasonable. To the north and east, scattered across volcanic rock outcroppings, there are petroglyphs left by pre-Hispanic communities whose names have mostly dissolved into scholarly debate. You reach some of them on dirt tracks that require asking locally for directions — no signage to speak of, no parking lot. I hired a man named Guadalupe who had a truck and knew which tracks to take. We drove forty minutes into absolute nowhere and arrived at a basalt face covered in spirals, deer, and geometric forms that nobody can quite agree on. Standing in front of them in full afternoon silence, I thought about what it means to leave a mark on something that will outlast every version of yourself.

Abandoned Haciendas and the Arithmetic of Decline

The mining era left its signature all over this part of Zacatecas, and Villa de Cos is no exception. Within an hour’s drive you can find haciendas in various states of elegant ruin — thick adobe walls with their plaster falling away in sheets, arched gateways standing without buildings behind them, patios where the well is still intact but everything else has returned to dust. The thing nobody tells you about these places is how unhurried the collapse looks. It does not feel violent or abandoned in the dramatic sense. It feels like the desert simply absorbed what was offered. I spent a long afternoon at one such hacienda, whose name I never confirmed because the locals just called it la vieja, photographing the quality of light through a collapsed roof onto a tile floor. That kind of afternoon is either a waste of time or the whole point, depending on who you are.

The Sunsets Are Non-Negotiable

There is no soft way to say this: the sunsets on the altiplano around Villa de Cos are absurd. The sky is too big, the dust in the air turns everything amber before shifting into something closer to violet, and there are no buildings tall enough to interrupt it. I watched three of them from the edge of town, sitting on a low wall with a cup of café de olla from the comedor on Calle Hidalgo. By the third evening I had stopped trying to photograph it properly and just sat there. Some things work better as memory than as image.

Getting There

Second-class buses from the Central Camionera in Zacatecas city run to Villa de Cos several times a day — the ride is roughly two hours along Federal Highway 45. There is no bus station in town, just a stop near the plaza. A few basic posadas offer rooms; it is worth calling ahead. Bring cash.