Crazy Money

(6/27/22)

We made a quick visit to Xilitla, a quaint town nestled in the rainforest to visit the dilapidated sculpture garden, called Las Pozas, built by an eccentric Brit with too much money & a god complex. Starting in 1949 and for the next 35 years, he purchased 80 acres to build his own 'garden of eden' in Mexico, which really means he paid locals to build a surrealist concrete sculpture garden (and required them to be naked while doing it, for some reason) that, sadly, also contained inhumane pens for exotic animals to be part of his private zoo. 😒

Today, Las Pozas is jointly owned by a cement company and the local government and run as a nonprofit tourist site. We got quite the guided tour through the gardens to see the overgrown remains of the facility, which at face value, is quite beautiful and intriguing. However, the tour was completely in Spanish, meaning I only caught about 50-80% of it & after a while, completely tuned it out in favor of searching for wildlife & interesting plants. 😉 Nick, however, got the full gist & from what I gather, the tour guide may have been his own kind of eccentric, telling wildly inconsistent tales of British aristocracy, relatives getting run over by elephants, seeing werewolves & la Llorona...needless to say, we were glad when the tour was over. 

Nick's impression of an explorer

But it was a sight to see and from there we headed off to the next hotel. Great thing about road tripping is that you can stop in unexpected places or take a quick detour when you see something cool on the side of the road. The town of Bernal was that thing this time. We saw a beautiful little colonial town en route & decided to stop there for dinner Turns out, Bernal is a Pueblo Mágico dating back to 1642, nestled at the base of Peña de Bernal, the third highest monolith on the planet!