Anyway, a day or two ago there was a short discussion of Mineral de Pozos (which evidently is usually called Pozos), and I got intrigued. It’s an old mining town that in its heyday had 50,000 or more residents, but now there are something between 800 and 4,000, depending on what you read. Some of those residents are artists and craftspeople, supposedly drawn there by the low rents (always a phrase to make my ears perk up), and there are foreigners living there. The town has a bit of a ghost town feel, with many old houses of stone in varying stages of falling apart. Kelly says it sounds like his kind of place — his father worked for years on restoring an old stone public building. (Not that Kelly hankers to follow his father’s footsteps; his passions are more in sustainable architecture.)

When we tear ourselves away from Guanajuato in a couple of weeks to continue our quest for Mexican towns and cities we might want to live in part-time or full-time, we will be heading first to Pozos. It’s not far from here or from San Miguel de Allende. The place could be a sister city (make that sister small town) to where we live in Colorado, in the old mining town of Crestone, which at its height around a hundred years ago had several thousand people and now has under 1,000, many of whom are artists and craftspeople. Since the construction during the mining era there was mainly of wood, there is little left, so in that way the towns are different.

I’m sure Kelly and I will do a photo-essay on Pozos after we’ve been there, and I’ll blog about it. In the meantime, here is the website on Pozos, created by photographer Bill Leiberman, who lives there. His personal website also has more photos of Pozos.

Mineral de Pozos, or Just Pozos: Old Mining Town is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Today Pozos has under 5,000 people. About a dozen foreigners live in and around Pozos full-time now. They and some of the Mexicans are artists of many kinds. In our two days there, we met photographers, gallery owners, musical instrument makers, a sculptor, a painter, a filmmaker, and a landscape gardener. I don’t know what label to put on Lena Bartula! All the work we saw was of a very high quality.

Many other people, both Mexican and foreign, have bought vacation homes or land. We discovered that there is a collective vision for Pozos, a sense that it will once again blossom as a center of beauty. A number of fine restorations have been completed, and others are underway. (Alas, the days of buying a glorious ruin for a song are passed, but real estate is still very reasonable compared to San Miguel de Allende and many other places in Mexico.)

We were lucky enough to be shown around by our friend Bill Lieberman, who is a professional photographer and also the webmaster of mineraldepozos.com, a site which describes this lovely little town in detail.

At Bill’s site, you can see a map and more photos of the town, as well as descriptions of the two extremely nice hotels on the town square, Casa Montana and Hotel Casa Mexicana, and the new bed and breakfast hotel nearby, Posada de las Minas.

We didn’t stay in any of these places, as we were in our little Toyota motorhome. There is no campground in Pozos, but Bill asked some of the workers in his restaurant (Los Famosos de Pozos — and it should be famous for its delicious food) for advice on where we might stay. Pozos is a very quiet little town, and he was told that we could park just about anywhere. We have found in traveling around Mexico that the local people are good guides to what is safe. We do fine without hookups, and at first we found a shady spot under a tree about a block away from the plaza. Then we were offered a spot on some private land, and we spent two very tranquil nights there.

The pictures below were taken by Kelly and me, around town and also at the Santa Brigida Mines, where Bill (the fellow with the camera below) filled us in on the history of the town and the region. The sculptor John Osmond lives in Pozos as well; even if you can’t see his work firsthand as we did, his website is lovely.

Mineral de Pozos: The Town and the Ruins is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico