Mineral de Pozos was a booming mining town back in the Nineteenth Century. At its peak, 70,000 people lived here: today the number has dropped to around 3,000. Abandoned buildings quietly decay in the sun, making the place a photographer’s playground.

Paul (El Guapo) Latoures and I made the short drive from San Miguel de Allende, looking for a few hours’ diversion with a pair of digital cameras.

In the Eighteenth Century Jesuits arrived in Pozos bent on converting the indigenous Chichimeca. Finding the locals engaged in small-scale mining of precious metals, the monks lost no time executing a hostile takeover. As the old expression goes, they came to do good and they did well. In 1767, Charles III threw the Jesuits out of New Spain, and mining ceased for seventy years.

Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821 and within a generation, entrepreneurial miners arrived in Pozos. A boom ensued during which a few became very rich and many others slaved to help them get that way.

By the early Twentieth Century, mining profitability had become marginal, and the boom died with the onset of the Cristeros War in 1926. The last mine limped to a close in 1965.

Mine owners left behind monuments to their wealth. Ex-Hacienda Cinco Señores gives a sense of the opulence they enjoyed.

Spacious grounds, stately buildings, and lots of servants: baronial surroundings mediated the travails of living out here in the boondocks—more than a day’s travel on horseback from someplace cultured like Querétaro.

The ruins have an entirely different look than most old Mexican buildings. I am accustomed to the colonial architecture prevalent in San MIguel de Allende. These are much newer.

Ex-Hacienda Cinco Señores even has its own chapel. Paul’s photograph captures the forsaken loneliness of the region. Deserted buildings left behind after a mining boom remind me of Bodie, a wind-swept ghost town in Northern California.

Photo: Paul Latoures

(Photographer’s note: Paul photographed the chapel using one of my cameras. I had forgotten to tell him I had fitted it with a polarizing filter, which is why the sky looks so blue.)

Ordinary Pozos residents lived in houses made of adobe, not stone like those of the rich folks. Roofs have collapsed long ago. The only reason rain hasn’t dissolved the walls is that there is so little of it.

Entrance to the property enclosed by these adobe walls is discouraged in the time-honored way: doorways and windows filled with loose stones and bricks. Probably more effective than a NO TRESPASSING sign.

During the last two decades, foreigners have become interested in Pozos, attracted by tranquility, picturesque ruins, and low prices for houses and land. Several artists have moved here. Someone told me there were exactly eighteen hotel rooms in town, all of them comfortable and charming. There’s a couple of nice restaurants.

Efforts to promote Pozos as an artists’ colony have met with limited success up to now. For me, though, the draw is in the ruins, the history, the solitude.

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Thank you, all of you who shared your kind thoughts in the comments and emails in response to my post about my prostate cancer. They mean more to me than I can say.