MINERAL DE POZOS, MEXICO — 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 here from Queretaro.
Another clerk piped up, I have. It's small.
Very small, said a taxi driver.
Now I was here, paying the cabbie, waving goodbye, turning to face a scene as dusty and forsaken as the one Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid found upon their cinematic arrival in Bolivia.
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. I could have fired a cannon in that main plaza and hit nobody, although it might have disturbed a sleeping dog or two.
The Mexicans call their ghost towns pueblos fantasmas, and Mineral de Pozos -- about 185 miles northwest of Mexico City and 40 miles northeast of San Miguel de Allende -- 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 10 art galleries (depending on how you count them) and perhaps 50 Americans, many of them artists, who live here at least part time.
But none of that quite gets at the nature of the place. If the Mexican acordionista Flaco Jimenez and Texan guitarrista Willie Nelson ever team up to make a concept album about regret, decay, renewal and high-desert succulents -- which they should -- they'll have to shoot the cover photo here.
I found my hotel, the Casa Montana, asked about a guide and soon was shaking hands with Marco Antonio Sanchez, whose family history tells the story of Pozos: His grandparents worked in the mines. Sanchez, on the other hand, earns his living by making, selling and playing pre-Hispanic musical instruments and occasionally guiding newcomers like me. (We spoke mostly Spanish, but he seemed to understand every word I uttered in English.)
We started our tour in the middle of town, where forsaken structures seem to outnumber occupied buildings about three to two. Out on the edge of town, the ratio is more like 10 to one. And then there are the outskirts.
