The Enigma of Las Pozas

I’m currently in the little town of Xilitla, still within the green mountains of San Luis Potósi.  Xilitla is a couple of cement-paved streets and crowing roosters on a hillside, plus someone blasting hop-hop music from a parked car under my hotel window.  The only reason I’m here is to see the nearby attraction of Las Pozas, which I did yesterday.  It was probably my last tourist attraction in Mexico, as from here I head straight for the border, but it was probably the most bizarre of all.

I’d heard of Las Pozas, and seen travel videos about it, and music videos set it in, and had fellow travellers at hostels recommend it.  In the name of all of the above, I think I’ll describe what it is by quoting my Lonely Planet guidebook:

“Las Pozas is a monumental scultpure garden built in thick jungle that links a series of concrete temples, pagodas, bridges, pavilions and spiral stairways with a necklace of natural waterfalls.  The surrealist creation stands as a memorial to the imagination and excessive wealth of Edward James (1907-84).  A drop-out English aristocrat and poet, he became a patron of Salvador Dali in the late 1930s and subsequently went on to amass the largest private collection of surrealist art in the world.”

What the rich, mad Old Worlder left behind here amid the steaming heat and draping, overhanging foliage is something like a gargantuan ruined playground based on the works of M.C Escher and Dr. Seuss.  You follow narrow paths through the jungle to come across one inconceivable cement structure after another, huge surrealist flights rising in spirals and pillars, with bulbs and domes, towers, unreachable rooms high in the air, stairs going nowhere, windows to nothing, multiple stories that don’t connect.  It’s an attempt to bring the symbols of a children’s book to life, and somehow it’s the kind of thing that could only be found in Mexico, wild fancies manifested in heavy drab cement and left to decay, like some abandoned socialist garden.  You admire it in surprise and a kind of pity.  The connecting stairs and paths hide one construction from another and make you quite sweaty as you seek them out, but the most charming aspect is just the gateways and the hidden routes, leading you on, until you loop back and realize you’ve seen it all.  The guidebook said one could spend a whole day there, but I finished sooner.  They give you a rubber bracelet with an electronic chip in it when you enter, and you hand it back when you leave.

The site has a nice café where I had lunch. 

(Photos taken with my iPad...I still miss my camera)