Santa Rosalia ^113
Being an overnight ferry, we disembarked in Santa Rosalia at seven
the next morning. Santa Rosalia was unlike any other Mexican town.
Its brightly painted clapboard houses, inns with large verandas, tiny
stores, and prefab churches resembled a typical one-horse town from
an old Western movie set. However, the village was, in fact, an old
French copper mining town. A closer investigation revealed old
locomotives and other mining machinery scattered about.
The most amusing was the history of the church. The old,
prefabricated church in town was built for the Paris 1889 World Fair,
allegedly designed by the famed Gustave Eiffel. After the fair, the
church was disassembled and stored in Brussels for shipping to West
Africa. Still, it somehow turned up in Santa Rosalia, where it remains
until this day.
Santa Rosalia – Mulege - 65km
By morning, we proceeded south to La Paz. The landscape
increasingly resembled the quintessential Mexican scenery imagined,
i.e., blue skies and cacti, but there were still no sombreros.
The tiny oasis community of Mulege signalled the end of the day’s
ride. Unfortunately, this tiny community had a depressing history. I
learned that indigenous people had lived in this area for thousands of
years. Europeans, sadly, brought diseases to which the indigenous
people had never been exposed. Consequently, they had no
immunity. By 1767, measles, plague, smallpox, typhus, and venereal
diseases had decimated the native population. Out of an initial
population of as many as 50,000, only a handful were assumed to
have survived. How sad is that?