silver mining | cathedral of Satevó

That proved more difficult than we anticipated. On a good day, which this was, it takes seven hours down a skinny, corkscrewing dirt road into the canyon to get to Batopilas. Seven hours around harrowing hairpin turns. Seven hours bouncing up and down on fallen rock and chuckholes. Seven hours of wondering if maybe you should have just stayed on the train. Batopilas is so remote and so difficult to get to that you wonder how anybody ever got the idea to build it in the first place. The answer, of course, is money. A few hundred years ago, explorers discovered silver in the area. By the 19th century, silver mining had hit its heyday, and the quiet, far-flung land was transformed into a bustling town of 10,000 residents. Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the mines were played out. Roughly 1,000 people live there today.

Finally we got there, and it was like landing in Eden.

Orange bougainvillea cascaded over its handsome stone walls, white oleander spilled over its bunga-lows. In the center of town was a plaza with a fountain. Nestled within the folds of the canyon floor, the town bordered a shimmering river that gurgled softly like a lover's whisper.

We hiked out to the lost cathedral of Satevó, as it's known, an early Spanish-style church far from anything at all. Considering that Batopilas is itself far from anything at all, the chapel is a head scratcher: Why didn't they build it in town? Whatever, the church is all the more beautiful in the middle of nowhere on the canyon floor surrounded by hills. Farther even than the church were the cave dwellings of the Tarahumara Indians, to which we also hiked. It happened that we were visiting during one of their religious celebrations, so we watched discreetly from behind a rock as they passed among themselves a greenish ceremonial bever-age and, at night, danced nearly naked in almost-freezing temperatures around a fire, the red and orange sparks popping in the starry sky.