Lost in the canyon bottom — Mexico's most remote colonial silver town, where the temperature is 30°C hotter than the rim above
Batopilas is a colonial silver-mining town sitting at 400m elevation at the bottom of the Batopilas Canyon — reached via a 4-hour unpaved road from Creel that descends nearly 2,000 vertical metres through the Copper Canyon walls. At the bottom, the climate changes completely: the canyon floor is subtropical (mango trees, citrus, bougainvillea) while the rim 25km above is pine forest with cold winters. The town of about 1,200 people has been producing silver since 1632 and peaked in the late 19th century when mining magnate Alexander Shepherd (former governor of Washington D.C.) installed the…
Spanish mining at Batopilas began in 1632, with the canyon's silver veins producing continuously for nearly 300 years. The isolation of the canyon floor paradoxically preserved Batopilas through the revolutionary chaos of 1910-1920 while the canyon rim settlements were raided repeatedly — the single canyon-bottom road made the town defensible and self-sufficient. The Alexander Shepherd era (1880-1906) brought the technical modernity of hydraulic mining equipment, an electric tramway to move ore, and a hydro-electric generator on the Batopilas River — technology so advanced for its location th…