Zacatecas is high, dry and built out of pink cantera stone, and for two centuries it produced a fifth of the world's silver.
Zacatecas city sits in a ravine at 2,400 metres beneath the Cerro de la Bufa, with a cathedral whose façade is among the most elaborately carved in the Americas. A cable car crosses the city from the hill to the mine; the Mina El Edén can be walked through, and part of it is a nightclub, several levels underground. The Rafael Coronel museum holds thousands of masks in a ruined convent.
Jerez is a cowboy town of arcaded streets and the birthplace of the poet Ramón López Velarde. Sombrerete is another silver town, with the Sierra de Órganos behind it — rock columns that stood in for the American West in a long run of Mexican films.
Fresnillo still works the largest silver mine in the world. Juchipila lies in a canyon in the south, where the Caxcan resisted the Spanish in the Mixtón war.
La Quemada, a fortified hill city on the road south, was a frontier outpost between Mesoamerica and the nomadic north.
