San Luis Potosí is two states in one. The west is high desert — thin air, mining towns, mirages; the east falls into the Huasteca Potosina, which is wet, green and full of rivers the colour of mouthwash.
San Luis Potosí city is the capital, a UNESCO centre built on silver money, with plazas that each have a different character and a baroque church at most of them.
Real de Catorce is the desert's set piece: a silver town of 15,000 that emptied to almost nothing, reached through a 2.3-kilometre mine tunnel, now half ghost town and half pilgrimage site. The surrounding Wirikuta desert is sacred to the Wixárika, who walk here for peyote; it is their church, and is treated as such.
The Huasteca is the adventure half. Xilitla holds Las Pozas, the concrete surrealist garden Edward James built in the jungle — staircases to nowhere, doors opening onto drops — and Aquismón is the base for the Tamul waterfall and the Sótano de las Golondrinas, a 370-metre shaft that swifts spiral out of at dawn.
Tamuín has the Huastec ruins of Tamtoc.
