The day started off with yet another knock at the door...we have had the flower lady, the tiny grandmother with her nopales, and now a man with 2 burros selling potatoes. It is a narrow one way street and the traffic started backing up,but nobody seemed to mind. Needless to say I bought potatoes!! This is San Miguel at its best..think about it!! Burro delivery to your door. Just down the street is an Italian bakery and cafe..It all works. It's all good.
We were just leaving to visit Mineral de Pozos,once a very wealthy silver mining area. Today,Pozos is all but deserted,and has been that way for almost a century. We were with Daniel our guide and friend of 3 years and he takes you off the beaten track to say the least. It is an hours drive, the last20 minutes of which is off road , and you climb up to 8000 feet. At one time Pozos had 70 000 inhabitants,but when the mines were depleted, it simply folded and the once very grand neoclassical buildings stand in ruin. There are about 1800 inhabitants now. There was kind of a run on trying to revive the town and tout it as an artist colony etc..but it is flat out in the middle of nowhere..no bus service and certainly no medical facilities,shopping etc... and to boot,a great water problem. The developers still push this but it is going nowhere really. Nonetheless there is a gorgeous hotel(the other one closed)where we had lunch . The rooms which are luxurious beyond belief start at eighty dollars including breakfast. The locals work 30 minutes away in a very industrial town that has some cement industry.
Before heading out to the former mines, we stopped at a typical Mexican cemetery just outside the town. Those buried there lie under a blazing sun. It is wide open to the elements and quite surreal..from grand monuments to graves with inscriptions on roofing tin.
We went out to where the original smelters still stand,(friends photo)alongside open mining pits!! Although the government tries to put warning signs and wire fences around these deadly shafts, they all disappear and it becomes treacherous to walk there without someone who knows the way. Some shafts are 200 feet deep. There is a very old caretaker who lives out there with his extended family. He is over 85 now. I don't know what he looks after but he is full of stories. He was one of the last workers of that mine and as a child of 8, he would carry wheelbarrows of stones out of the mines. He told us that the old hacienda(photo) once belonged to Porfirio Diaz, an important Mexican revolutionary who housed his prisoners of war in the hacienda and made them work in the mines. Its ownership has been in dispute for many years now , and so it sits, solid as a rock in the middle of the old mine. I checked all the doors and windows in the hopes of getting inside(likely). Probably full of snakes..lots of rattlers out there too!! It was intriguing. Surprisingly, people do not seem to scavenge all these ruins. We headed homeward along some back roads and what struck me were the miles and miles of stone walls marking off the land parameters of each mine owner. Some are 12 feet high. These were all built by a slave population. Not only did the European mine owners use the indigenous population but also imported slaves from Africa whose lives were abysmal. This is my third visit to Pozos and next time it might be fun to stay at that hotel and just wander the town for a day. Tomorrow..Mexico city and the Island of the Dolls. It is an early bus and as I forgot my little clock..my trusty husband is giving me a wake up call from Montreal via Skype!!
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