Puente de Ojuela

Ojuela was a silver and gold camp in the Durango desert that boomed for centuries and emptied in the twentieth, leaving a ghost settlement clinging to a mountainside and, spanning the gorge in front of it, one of the more alarming pieces of industrial heritage in Mexico. The Puente de Ojuela was built in the late nineteenth century - engineered in the era of the great cable bridges - to carry ore and workers across the ravine, and it survives as a pedestrian crossing: about 300 metres of wooden planks slung from cables, roughly 100 metres above the canyon floor, swaying underfoot with every step and every gust. Crossing it is the attraction, and the payoff on the far side is the mine: guided walks enter the old workings, lit by lamp, past timbering and ore chutes, with the mineral collections that made Ojuela famous among mineralogists - the site's specimens sit in museums worldwide. Around it stand the ruins of the settlement, chapel and cemetery, and the desert of the Mapimi Bolson beyond.

History

Mining here dates to the late 16th century, when the Mapimí district was founded in 1598, and the Peñoles company, which bought the Ojuela property in the 1890s, modernised the mine; the bridge was built to carry ore by rail across the canyon. Sources give its date as 1892 or 1899, and an account of 1908 described it as about 1,100 feet long and 300 feet above the canyon floor (Wikipedia, Ojuela Bridge).

What to look for

• The bridge - 300 metres of planks over a 100-metre drop.
• The ghost town - ruins, chapel and cemetery on the slope.
• The mine tour - lamplit galleries in the old workings.
• The Bolson desert - the Mapimi basin stretching away.

When to go

October to April for tolerable desert heat; mornings for the best light in the gorge and the calmest air on the bridge.

Good to know

The bridge is genuinely exposed and moves - vertigo sufferers should not attempt it, and children need close hands. Facilities are minimal; bring water. The access track is rough in places.

Nearby

Mapimi's pueblo magico plaza sits below; the Bolson de Mapimi reserve lies north and Torreon south-east.

Key facts