Rising from the ruins

I arrived in eerie, old Mineral de Pozos in the middle of a half-sunny afternoon, with cotton-candy cloud shadows creeping all over the adobe rubble, the reclaimed ruins, the cactus thickets and the little-trod cobblestone streets.

Never heard of the place, a hotel clerk had said in Spanish as I prepared to make the 50-mile trip from Queretaro. Another clerk piped up, I have. It's small.

Now I was here, paying the cabbie, waving goodbye turning to face a scene dusty and forsaken.

Bleached skulls hung atop old poles. The hands on the clock that towered over the main plaza were frozen.

At an abandoned chapel that now serves as a goat pen, 4-foot cactuses rose from the eaves.

Ghost town

The Mexicans call their ghost towns pueblos fantasmas and Mineral de Pozos — about 185 miles northwest of Mexico City — is one of them, a relic from the great Mexican mining boom of the late 19th century.

But Pozos isn't dead. It's slowly growing, its ghosts joined by perhaps 3,500 residents who have begun filling the reclaimed ruins with contemporary art and pre-Hispanic music.

The town has three hotels, eight to ten art galleries and perhaps 50 Americans, many of them artists, who live here at least part-time.

I found my hotel, the Casa Montana, asked about a guide and soon was shaking hands with Marco Antonio Sanchez.

Sanchez earns his living by making, selling and playing pre-Hispanic musical instruments and occasionally guiding newcomers such as me.

We started our tour in the middle of town, where forsaken structures seem to outnumber occupied buildings.

Before long, we were crouching amid the ruins of an old mining hacienda, the sky spread above where a roof should have been, peering into the black depths of an old well (pozo). “Muy profundo'', Sanchez warned me (profundo: deep).

Once inhabited

At Santa Brigida, a trio of bulky stone ovens loomed like pyramids or maybe smokestacks on a half-buried cruise ship.

At the Hacienda de Cinco Senores mine on the west end of town, the buildings arched and sprawled down the hillside, the walls riddled with strange openings that once held all sorts of mineral-extraction machinery.

Some of the old mine sites are owned by individuals, some are owned by ejido or communal organisations and some are in dispute.

At Santa Brigida and Cinco Senores the biggest sites deep shafts were minimally marked. It's a rotten place for unsupervised kids, an excellent place for hiring a guide.

Satiates creativity

So if you're a painter, photographer, history geek, architecture dweeb, mineralogy wonk or a seeker of singular landscapes, this could be the beginning.

Every May, there's a mariachi festival; every July, a pre-Hispanic music festival; every September, a celebration of the nopal and maguey plants.

As I drifted off to sleep that first night, on a four-poster bed in a spacious, well-appointed room, I imagined the whole town as an artefact carried back by an artist to the studio — not a conventionally pretty artefact but an absorbing one, evocative and mysterious.

Lasting mark

And then I wished I had aspirin, because Pozos is about 7,500 feet above sea level and my altitude headache didn't subside until the next morning, when Sanchez led me through the landmarks of the town's resurgence.

I headed back out to the dusty street, where a tethered horse sipped from a bucket.

In the town's only refreshment joint, the owner hunkered down beneath his collection of posters and photos.

I flashed back to a moment when Sanchez pointed at a prickly pear cactus in front of a crumbling wall.

Working with something sharp, someone had carved a near-perfect cross out of the flesh of the cactus.

The bright blue sky and fast-drifting clouds shone through the freshly cut-away shape. “Never seen it before,'' Sanchez said.

Go there ... Pozos

From the UAE

San Luis Potosi is one of the closest airports

From Dubai

Emirates and Continental fly daily via Houstan.
Fare from Dh9,370

— Information courtesy:

The Holiday Lounge by Dnata.
ph: 04 4298576

From Los Angeles, a connecting service to Queretaro is offered on Continental and Mexicana. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $538 (Dh1,975.9).

Taxi rides between Queretaro and Pozos cost about $40 (Dh146.9).

Where to stay

Where to eat

Information

Looking back

Pozos was born in 1576 as a mining town and grew in fits and starts alongside half a dozen other boomtowns in the high, rugged central region that Mexicans call the Bajio.

By the last years of the 19th century, the number of working mines had reached 300 and the population in Pozos had reached 70,000.

But then came the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Mines began closing down and many were flooded. Silver prices fell.

And it didn't help that many Pozos residents were militant Catholics at a time when the Mexican government was dominated by anti-Catholic forces. Pozos was doomed.

By the 1950s, some say, the town had shrivelled to about 200 and became a half-forgotten exurb of the small city of San Luis de la Paz, about five miles away.

Still, if you look closely up the streets of Pozos, you see signs of its new bohemian life. In 1982, the Mexican government declared the town a national historic treasure.