Real de Catorce

Where it sits. Real de Catorce clings to a fold of the Sierra de Catorce in northern San Luis Potosí, about 2,750 metres above sea level and some 260 kilometres north of the state capital. Below it to the east spreads the Wirikuta desert, a high, thorny plain of creosote and peyote cactus running toward the Altiplano. The only vehicle approach from the north-east is the Ogarrio tunnel, a single-lane bore of roughly 2.3 kilometres driven through the mountain by miners and opened in 1901; traffic alternates direction, and a wait at the mouth while a convoy comes the other way is part of arriving. The last stretch before it is a cobbled road laid over the old camino real, which rattles teeth for twenty-five kilometres.

The story behind it. Silver was struck here in the 1770s and the settlement was formally founded in 1779, taking the name Real de Minas de Nuestra Señora de la Limpia Concepción de Guadalupe de los Álamos de Catorce. At its peak in the late nineteenth century it held something in the order of 15,000 people, minted its own coin, and supported a bullring, a cockfighting palenque, a theatre and a mint building of 1863. The collapse came fast: falling silver prices and Mexico's shift toward the gold standard after 1905 gutted the economy, and the town emptied within a generation, leaving roofless stone shells across the hillsides. Federal recognition as a Pueblo Mágico in 2001 turned a ghost town into a destination without much altering its fabric.

On screen. Real de Catorce's most consequential screen credit is The Mexican (2001), directed by Gore Verbinski with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, whose Mexican sequences were filmed in and around the town in 2000, including inside the Ogarrio tunnel. The production dominated the village for weeks — a place with barely any telephone lines suddenly hosting trailers and generators — and the international coverage that followed, combined with the Pueblo Mágico designation the following year, remade the local economy around visitors rather than ore. The town's peculiar advantage as a location is that it needs almost no dressing: the ruined stone façades, the unpaved streets, the horses tied outside cantinas and the absence of modern shopfronts read as period without intervention. Other productions and countless photographers have come for the same reason.

What you actually see today. The permanent population is a few hundred, spread through a grid of steep cobbled lanes where restored guesthouses stand beside collapsed walls open to the sky. The Templo de la Purísima Concepción, with its floor of wooden planks laid over burial vaults, houses the image of San Francisco de Asís — Panchito — that draws pilgrims from across the north; a side room is papered with thousands of retablos, small painted tin panels thanking the saint for surviving car crashes, illnesses and border crossings. Nearby stand the Casa de la Moneda, the shell of the Palenque de Gallos, and a small plaza de toros. Beyond the built-up area, tracks lead to the Pueblo Fantasma ruins on the ridge and, on horseback or on foot, to the sacred summit of Cerro Quemado.

The other pilgrimage. The desert below the sierra is Wirikuta, one of the most important sacred landscapes of the Wixárika (Huichol) people, who walk or travel hundreds of kilometres from Nayarit, Jalisco and Durango to gather hikuri, or peyote, and to make offerings at Cerro Quemado, where they hold that the sun was born. The route and the territory have been the subject of long-running legal disputes with mining concessions. Visitors should understand they are in a living ceremonial area: peyote harvesting is illegal for non-Wixárika people and ecologically damaging, ceremonies are not performances, and the drug tourism the town attracts is a genuine friction point with both the community and Mexican law.

Getting there and timing. Buses run from San Luis Potosí or Matehuala to the village of Estación Catorce or to Cedral, from where shared vehicles cover the last cobbled climb and the tunnel. Nights are cold year-round at this altitude and can freeze between November and February; days are bright and dry, with the summer rains bringing brief storms and green in July and August. Around 4 October, the feast of Saint Francis, the town fills with pilgrims and rooms vanish. Steep cobbles, unlit lanes and thin air make it hard going for anyone with mobility limits, and it rewards two nights rather than a day trip. Cash matters here: card acceptance is patchy, the nearest reliable bank machines are down in Matehuala, and mobile signal comes and goes with the ridgeline. Evenings are for the plaza, a mezcal and the silence, which is total once the last vehicles have gone back through the tunnel.