El Charco del Ingenio
San but true: Mexico has been trashed. The wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly have been decimated by illegal loggers. In Puebla, the Valsequilla Reservoir is so contaminated with heavy metals that hundreds of children are born with birth defects. Much of the country is disfigured by stinking swathes of litter.
The country is a pigsty.
It's not that ordinary Mexicans don't care about the environment. It's not that they don't want to or can't afford to clean up the mess. It's that self-seeking and corrupt elites, from the bribe-hungry police to the aristocrats holding the highest offices are more interested in their own enrichment than in preserving their patrimony. They take kickbacks from illegal loggers, turn a blind eye to studies proving drinking water contamination, accept bribes to ignore roadside dumping.
Against this massive despoliation, a few projects provide sparks of hope. El Charco is a particularly beautiful one.
A modest palapa serves as the entry to the gardens, where you pay a $30 peso day pass fee unless, like me, you are awarded an annual membership. My privileges allow me to secure entry for guests like El Guapo here. This is the only way he can get in, having been denied full membership. (Apparently someone blackballed him—a not entirely unfamiliar experience, I'm sure.)
Just beyond the entrance, plantings of cactus and other xeriscape plants greet visitors. It's immediately obvious that these gardens are designed, planted and maintained by experts. Mexico has some beautiful gardens, but few so manicured as these.
A clue to where the skillful gardening comes from appears in the form of that rarest of all Mexican gardeners: one with pruning shears. Usually you see guys with machetes whacking away at the shrubbery. Used for shearing, pruning, lopping and felling trees, they perform none of these tasks well. At el Charco, someone has gone to the expense of providing gardeners with proper tools, and training them how to use them.
El Charco is more than a bunch of formal plantings. The preserve covers 100 hectares (250 acres) of canyon, hills, streams, reservoirs and structures. Directional signs on a dead tree point out visitors' options.
Unfortunately, an additional sign prohibits dogs. The management was unwilling to waive this rule, even for a well-mannered purebred Boston Terrier. Rosie was disappointed.
The fanciful Plaza de los Cuatro Vientos (Plaza of the Four Winds) is used for a number of public activities, some involving indigenous traditions, music and dance.
On the south side of the plaza, a stone pavilion with an altar houses smaller functions.
In the summer, a súchil appears. A form of religious offering, it's made by local indigenous people from the leaves of the Green Desert Spoon (one of the agaves). Raising of the súchil is a part of the festival of the holy Cross—a blending of European and Indian religious traditions that underscores the futility of the efforts of the conquistadors to eradicate indigenous beliefs and culture.
El Charco packs a lot into 100 hectares. Hiking trails take you through a steep-walled canyon containing ponds, wildlife, and plants.
That's an abandoned aqueduct running along the canyon wall.
A silted-up reservoir provides habitat for egrets and other waterfowl.
The structure on the horizon is the crown jewel of el Charco: the Conservatory of Mexican Plants. It contains a wonderful collection of desert plants, mostly cactus, some of them rare. I'll cover the conservatory in a future post.
If you come to San Miguel, el Charco is a "don't miss." If you live here, you should become a member and visit it frequently. Projects like this need and deserve your support. You have no business complaining about litter or polluting buses if you're not supporting efforts to restore and improve the environment.
And you need el Charco. You need a few quiet hours, sitting beside still water, breathing in all the natural beauty, healing yourselves. The Indians who have lived here for millennia know this. Time for us gringos to learn it too.