Las Pozas

Story

Edward James didn't build Las Pozas to be visited. He built it to be inhabited — by himself, by his animals, and by whatever mood the Sierra Gorda rainforest was in that day. The English eccentric and surrealist patron arrived in Xilitla in November 1945, guided there by Plutarco Gastélum Esquer, a Yaqui photographer he'd hired in Cuernavaca. What James found was a subtropical canyon laced with natural pools and waterfalls, dense enough that the light arrived in pieces. He started with orchids — 29,000 of them at the site's peak — and a private zoo of flamingos, deer, and boa constrictors. Then the concrete arrived.

Between 1949 and 1984, James and a rotating crew of more than 40 masons, carpenters, and blacksmiths built structures with names that function as architecture criticism: The House on Three Floors Which Will in Fact Have Five or Four or Six. The House with a Roof like a Whale. The Staircase to Heaven. Carpenter José Aguilar translated James's sketches into wooden molds; wet concrete filled them; the jungle slowly agreed to share the space.

The most photographed structure is the Staircase to Heaven — two staircases spiraling around columns that mimic the reproductive anatomy of an orchid, converging roughly 65 feet up with nowhere useful to go. That uselessness was entirely the point. James wanted his structures to have no function beyond existing beautifully in a place that was already beautiful. To fund it all, he auctioned his collection of Surrealist art — Dalís, Magrittes, works he'd spent decades acquiring — and poured the proceeds directly into the hillside.

James died in 1984. Plutarco Gastélum stopped construction on the spot, leaving several structures mid-pour. In 2007, the Fundación Pedro y Elena Hernández and the cement company Cemex purchased the site for approximately $2.2 million and established Fondo Xilitla to oversee its preservation. The jungle has been quietly negotiating with the concrete ever since.