El Triunfo

26 January 2023 – Yesterday we rented a car in La Paz and today we drove about an hour to the old silver and gold mining town of El Triunfo. It is a lovely old colonial town with a couple of museums and some nice shops.

EL Triunfo Mining Museum

Smokestack from old smelter in El Triunfo

We could not get into the Mining Museum right away so we went down to the Museum of the Mexican Cowboy then went back to the Mining Museum. After touring the mining Museum we at lunch in the outdoor café then we walked up to the old smoke stacks from the mine (two of them), to a tailing dump, and to an English cemetery which had a row of very old whitewashed crypts with no identifying information as to who was within.

The Panteon Ingles, cemetery of the unknown English in EL Triunfo

After that we walked around the town a little bit and looked at some of the architecture. The town is small, the Mining Museum was fairly small but comprehensive, and the Cowboy Museum was larger and very thorough (although I saw nothing on the Mexican cowboys who went to Hawaii and took their guitars with them, which later became the slat key guitars for which Hawaiian music is famous.) Mexican Cowboys were the prototypes for American Cowboys and much of what is considered typical clothing, style and culture of the American Cowboy came from Mexican Cowboys.

In the evening we drove back to Costa Baja Marina via the road north of the Marina and on the landward side of Bahia Falsa, and interesting perspective since we had only ever anchored in the Bay.

Bahia Falsa from landward