Zacatecas, the silver city

A baroque city built out of the silver under it

Zacatecas fills a narrow, steep valley in north-central Mexico between the hills of La Bufa and El Grillo. Its name comes from the Zacateco people, from the Nahuatl for people of the grasslands, and Chichimeca peoples, the Zacatecos most numerous among them, were mining silver and other metals in these hills long before Europeans arrived. In 1546 Juan de Tolosa brought back rock samples from the Cerro de la Bufa rich in silver and lead, and a mining camp grew at the foot of the hill. The Zacatecos fought the Spanish presence and were defeated in the 1540s. The first major silver vein was found in 1548 at the San Bernabé mine, and others followed at Vetagrande, Pánuco and elsewhere.

Within a few years the camp became one of the most important cities of New Spain and the most populous after Mexico City, and in 1585 Philip II made it a city and granted its coat of arms. Indigenous workers came and enslaved Africans were brought in to work the mines. The town spread down the course of the Arroyo de la Plata, now under Hidalgo Avenue, and built tall for lack of flat ground. The Franciscans arrived in 1558, the Augustinians in 1576 and the Dominicans in 1604, and many missionary expeditions to what are now California and Texas set out from here.

UNESCO listed the historic centre in 1993 for the architecture and layout its silver paid for. It keeps almost all of its sixteenth-century street plan and 15 religious complexes, mainly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The cathedral, built between 1730 and 1760 over the ruins of pre-Hispanic temples, has a profusion of Baroque facades in sculpted pink stone, where European and indigenous decorative elements sit side by side.

In June 1914 Francisco Villa's División del Norte, under the direct command of General Felipe Ángeles, took Zacatecas, the last stronghold of Victoriano Huerta's forces, clearing the way for Villa toward Mexico City. Every 23 June the city marks the battle with cultural events and fireworks on the Cerro de la Bufa, home of the Toma de Zacatecas Museum, and in the Plaza de Armas.

Mining remains an important industry. The El Edén mine, opened in 1586 and worked mostly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for gold and silver, closed in 1960 because its entrance lies in the middle of the city, and reopened as a tourist attraction in 1975; a small train runs about half a kilometre into the mountain before guided walks through its passages. Between the two hills, El Teleférico, a Swiss-built cable car of 1979, crosses about 650 metres over the city in some eight minutes, except in high winds.