After having spent weeks in the warmer,wetter South, Zacatecas felt more like home. The streets were wider, the people were taller, and the pace was faster.

Alter Carved in the Rock of the Mina El Edén

It took twenty-five years of searching for the Spanish to find the first great silver deposits in its Mexican colony. In 1546, the Basque, Juan de Tolosa, made a major strike in Zacatecas in the rough, arid mountains deep in Chichimec territory. Soon, five thousand mines--the richest were in the northern most inhospitable areas--sent incredible amounts of silver flowing south to Mexico City. Zacatecas, producing one-fifth of all of the colony's silver, became the third largest city in Mexico. The silver trade brought the promise of great wealth and everything that follows in its wake--urban centers, farming, commerce, craftsmen, and the livestock herds that begat the modern-day ranches which fill the expanses of northern Mexico.

A bit of apprehension accompanies the tour inside the damp, dark tunnels and across the rope bridges of the old mine.

Zacatecas is as much fun to visit as it is to say. Repeating it several times in succession reduces the most sober adult to their ten-year old Saturday-morning, cartoon-watching self gleefully spraying "suffering succotash" in all directions. Many of the sites of Zacatecas appeal to that same ten-year old. Above all else, in appeal and literally, is the teleferico, a suspended cable-car trip between the twin peaks that bookend the historical center of the city. Only ten minutes long the trip lets you travel between one of the richest silver mines of the New World and vistas on the other peak that oversaw some of the richest events of Mexican history.

Templo de Fatima overlooks Parque Enrique Estrada

Zacatecas is self-confident and self-contained, the site of a major university and much bustling agriculture and commerce. Today, the area produces decent red wines, and it is the nation's largest producer of guavas. Even it's mines still produce some silver and there have been recent discoveries of additional mineral wealth. Because of it's fine complement of art, cultural, and historical museums as well as its pleasant parks and remarkable architecture--the gorgeous cathedral was dedicated in 1729 and much of the other architecture dates from the Porfirio Díaz era--Zacatecas is a favorite destination for Mexican families. While waiting in lines at the various sites we were recipients of many acts of kindness and many friendly inquiries precisely because in this northern city we were unaccountably a rare commodity--American tourists. Yet, in many ways after having spent weeks in the warmer, wetter South, Zacatecas felt more like home. The streets were wider, the people were taller, and the pace was faster. Zacatecas has enough restaurants, but nowhere near the offerings of Guanajuato or San Miguel. Nor does it have the large number of street peddlers, beggars, or chiclet-selling children. Instead there were large, useful street signs, a friendly tourist office with tons of pamphlets (hardly any were in English), a downtown set of classy handicraft shops, and outdoor theater that seemed excellent in quality but, well, almost more European than Mexican--mimes and magicians rather than mariachis.

Pancho Villa rides atop Cerro de la Buffa

It is impossible to be in Zacatecas and not look up or go up. The tour of the Mina El Edén, atop Cerro del Grillo takes you deep into the mountain via a short tram ride. A bit of apprehension accompanies the tour inside the damp, dark tunnels and across the rope bridges of the old mine. Spanish-speaking guides point flashlights up to the veins of metal and down a thousand feet to the pools of water and flooded lower levels where thousands of Indian laborers lost their lives either quickly in a missed step or slowly in the backbreaking toil that was silver mining in the colonial era. The average life span of an Indian miner was thirty-six years. From 1586, with the discovery of the mercury method of separating the silver in the ore from the rock itself, until mid-twentieth-century this mine produced thousands of pounds of silver ore, making Spain a wealthy world power and Zacatecas a city of magnificence. Pounds of rock carried on the backs of Indians up to waiting pack trains bound for Mexico City mints and then on to Imperial Spain caused the rush of settlements in Northern Mexico, and contributed to European wars, inflation, and eventually even the rise of capitalism.

The former bullring, now the Hotel Quinta Real

Because Mexican ore, while plentiful, was fairly low-quality, huge amounts of rock had to be extracted from the silver mountains for the silver yield to remain high. Early on, pacified Purépechans from Michoacán were imported to meet the labor needs of the northern mines. The mining method used was simple: follow the silver. Narrow twisting tunnels followed the veins deep into the mountain--as deep as fifteen hundred feet . The tunnels were dark, fetid and extremely dangerous. With two-hundred pounds on their back, Indians carried the ore through skinny passageways on their hands and knees, up dangerous narrow ladders, across swinging rope bridges suspended high above chasms so deep there could be no rescue if they fell--for at least twelve hours every day. Death came often; perhaps, it was welcome.

Pedro Coronel Sculpture in the Pedro Coronel Museum

It is a resurrection to exit the mine and heavenly to ride the cable car, whose nearby entrance is often packed with large Mexican families waiting for the Swiss-made teleférico, which you travel, swaying gently, to Cerro de la Bufa, the highest peak in Zacatecas and site of a chapel, several museums and marvelous romantic statues of Pancho Villa and other rebel leaders on horseback. Because of both its wealth and its strategic location, astride the main route from the northern desert south to the populous center of Mexico, Zacatecas was often a desired prize for various assorted rebels. In 1871 (President Benito Juárez's forces defeated the French-led armies of the Second Empire) and again in 1914 (Pancho Villa's cavalry wiped out a twelve-thousand strong force loyal to President Huerta), Zacatecas was the site of several decisive battles in Mexican history. A pivot city--above it there are the endless dry acres of Northern Mexico, and below it swings the Mexican heartland, the bajio breadbasket--Zacatecas commands the landscape of north central Mexico as assuredly as Cerro de la Bufa commands the city itself.

Francisco Goita's self portrait hangs in the lobby of his museum

The riches below the windswept heights of Cerro de la Bufa and Cerro del Grillo, now lie not in silver mines but in the three or four world-class museums situated in the narrow defile between the mountains that holds the main thoroughfares of the city. In a lovely park by the aqueduct and the Hotel Quinta Real, a four star hotel built around a former bullring, and backed by the modern but strikingly lovely Templo de Fatima is the Museo Francisco Goitia, which holds works of six modern Zacatecan artists. Inside it is the wildly dramatic canvases of Francisco Goitia that demand your attention. There are some lovely, basic landscapes and European-style paintings by Goitia in the museum (he studied in Barcelona in the early part of the century), but the most striking canvases are his self-portraits and his later works of indígenasmainly from the state of Guerrero, one of Mexico's poorest areas. The self-portraits--and even his landscapes are self-portraits also, merely disguised as twisted trees and wild, windblown grass--are such strong statements of a tortured proud, intense man with flowing locks like a Mexican St. John the Baptist that they have their own force field. Like a latter day prophet, he spent his last austere days in Guerrero in poverty, and the photo-essay on the museum's second floor depicting his death there is fascinating. Once a staff artist in the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa, he protested through his art the brutality of war and poverty on the least powerful members of Mexican society. There is a stylized romanticism to much of his work that prefigures the later more famous muralists, like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, of mid-century

Diablo Masks in the Raphael Coronel Museum

Just like the highly ornate facade of the Cathedral of Zacatecas, the Pedro Coronel Museum is a little too much to take in at a single glance, rather like a one-hour, all-inclusive slide show of the Great Hits of Modern Western Painting.

Slightly above the cathedral of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, the famous Cathedral of Zacatecas, renowned for its beautifully encrusted baroque facade of rosy pink stone, is the Pedro Coronel Museum. Both Pedro Coronel and his brother Raphael contributed greatly to modern Mexican art directly through their own works and indirectly through their magnificent museums. The Pedro Coronel Museum, for example, contains in addition to Pedro Coronel's own sculptures and tomb, his superb collections of pre-Hispanic (wonderful Mayan artifacts), African, Greek, and Oriental art. Then there are galleries full of works by the Big Names of twentieth-century European art. Spanish artists are particularly well represented, e.g., Goya, Picasso, Dali , Miro--and that's just the first room. Just like the highly ornate facade of the Cathedral of Zacatecas outside its entrance, the Pedro Coronel Museum is a little too much to take in at a single glance, rather like a one-hour, all-inclusive slide show of the Great Hits of Modern Western Painting.

On down the road, but much further back in history, is the Raphael Coronel Museum. His justly famous collections are housed in a former monastery, and poking through the partially ruined picturesque edifice, filled with noisy groups of children doing art projects and playing games when we were there, is half of the fun. The monastery dates from the fifteen-hundreds, and in one of those amazing accommodations of opposites at which the Mexicans excel, former holy places now house hundreds and hundreds of pagan masks and a pre-Hispanic pottery collection. Represented are masks from each Mexican state, indigenous group and area of the country. There are masks which were and are worn for the innumerable festivals and dances cluttering the Mexican cultural calendar. All that is wonderful, mysterious, magical and decidedly un-norteamericano is present in this collection: papier-maché jaguars, wooden devils with pinochio noses and ferocious hair, full-body sculptures of alligators with six-foot tails, and room after room filled with the imagination of a country where witches peacefully reside next to ubiquitous plaster Virgins of Guadalupe in happy collaboration.

Puppets displayed as a bullfight diorama in the Raphael Coronel Museum

Raphael Coronel inherited part of the collection he bequeathed to his native city from Diego Rivera, who was his father-in-law, and there are also examples of the work from all three artists--Diego and his daughter Ruth Rivera, and Raphael Coronel--in the rambling Ex-Convento de San Francisco, as well as a quirky collection of puppets. The puppets, part of a huge collection of marionettes which were used by companies touring the nineteenth-century Mexican countryside, are displayed in dioramas--delightful snapshots of popular entertainment in the pre-cable-TV age.

There is a fairly frivolous side to Zacatecas--we are speaking of Mexico, after all--including Callejoneada Zacatecana, a famous tradition of drinking your way through the city's narrow alleys with drums and horns following a mescal-laden burro, ending often for wealthier revelers in a dinner in former bullring of the Hotel Quinta Real. And there is the famous disco bar inside Mina El Eden as well as numerous student hangouts. Still, if you have an odd hour or two in between partying bouts or teleférico rides, there are a couple more specialty niche museums to explore. One is the University museum, Museo Universitario de Ciencias, near the small, lover-laden Jardin de la Madre, which contains early scientific instruments, gleaming in precise magnificence. Finally, there is a charming small museum, Museo Zacatecano, partially devoted to art of the Huichol Indians, whose fanciful, colorful handicrafts--yarn paintings of plants and animals, small sculptures of snakes and jaguars, and imaginative beadwork--give insight into this relatively isolated, largely intact indigenous people, whose home lands are in the rugged mountains of Jalisco and Nayarit states. Each act of their daily life is a religious one--part of the maintenance duties their culture demands of them. Originally left as prayer offerings, their handicrafts, their art, now helps them fight off the inroads of modern culture, or eases their adjustment to it.

The men wearing white embroidered tunics and the women wearing widow-peaked, red headscarves, whole Huichol families are deposited at the bus station north of town. Perhaps they are in from the remote ranchos and come to the big city, to Zacatecas, to sell their handicrafts, and maybe a bit of their souls, to the fancy tourist shops in the Mercado Ortega next to the Cathedral downtown. Zacatecas is still the city of silver.