January 2005 — Perhaps my favorite website on Mexico is Mexico Connect, a site that has recently become free. Along with a lot of terrific articles about many places in Mexico, it has a very active forum. (When I mentioned Kelly using a mirror with our digital camera, it led to a very interesting and heated thread on where different people draw the line about taking pictures.)
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.
Posted in Mineral de Pozos