San Luis Potosí is two states in one body. There is the colonial capital — the pink quarry stone of the historic centro, the Plaza de Armas, the Teatro de la Paz with its neoclassical facade, the silver mines in Real de Catorce that made the region valuable to empires. And then there is the Huasteca Potosina: a different terrain entirely, a tropical lowland of impossible waterfalls and turquoise rivers and caves and jungle that looks like it was designed for a movie that doesn't exist yet. The potosino carries both of these places inside them, often simultaneously.
The Huasteca Potosina: Tamul, Tampaón, and the Surrealist Garden
The Tamul waterfall is the tallest in Mexico — forty-one meters of water dropping into a river that runs turquoise from the mineral content of the limestone through which it flows. You reach it by canoe. There is no other way that makes sense. The river around you has that specific blue-green color that travelers photograph and that potosinos grow up thinking of as simply what water looks like when it's good.
The Puente de Dios — the Bridge of God — is a natural rock bridge over a river in the Huasteca, where the water pools in a luminous blue-green and the forest closes over it. Las Pozas de Xilitla is nearby: the surrealist garden built deep in the jungle by Edward James, a British poet and patron who moved to the Mexican jungle in the 1940s and spent the rest of his life constructing a network of concrete towers, staircases that end in mid-air, and structures shaped like flowers at a scale that should not be possible. James befriended the Surrealists — Dalí, Magritte — and then went to the jungle and built his own dream. The garden is still there. The potosino lives in the state where that jungle exists and the waterfall is real.
Enchiladas Potosinas: The Version That Doesn't Apologize for Being Different
If you show the potosino an enchilada from another state, she will be polite. She has been raised right. But she knows the difference.
Enchiladas potosinas start with a masa dough infused with dried guajillo or ancho chile — the tortilla itself is red before it's filled. The filling is typically fresh cheese and beans or rajas, then the whole thing is folded and fried or toasted, then bathed in more chile sauce. The result is denser, more deeply flavored, more involved in construction than the sauced-and-baked versions familiar elsewhere. The potosino doesn't need enchiladas potosinas explained. She needs you to understand that once you've had them, the other ones are a different dish.
Silver, Chichimec Heritage, and the State Capital
The city of San Luis Potosí was founded in 1592, named in part after Potosí in present-day Bolivia — another silver mining city — because the early Spanish settlers hoped to find the same mineral wealth. They found silver. The colonial city that grew from that wealth is one of the best preserved in Mexico: pink sandstone neomannerist facades, Churrigueresque altarpieces inside churches that took decades to build, the Templo de El Carmen with its tiled dome, the Teatro de la Paz that in 1894 President Porfirio Díaz ordered built and that still hosts performances.
The Chichimec people — the Chichimeca Jonaz, who call themselves Uza — are the indigenous community most associated with the north of the state. They were the last major indigenous group in central Mexico to be subdued by the Spanish, holding out in the Chichimec War for forty years. Their descendants still live in the state.
San Luis Potosí Gifts for the Potosino Who Carries Both Worlds
The San Luis Potosí T-Shirt and San Luis Potosí Sweatshirt from Smile Mas are for the potosino who has stood at the edge of the Tamul waterfall and also walked the colonial centro in the same weekend and didn't consider this unusual. For the one who has made enchiladas potosinas in a kitchen in Los Angeles and watched other people realize they've been missing something. For the tío who has explained Real de Catorce to people who've never heard of it and watched their faces change.
Browse the Mexican State Pride collection → for every estado, and see Guanajuato → for the other major colonial city with centuries of silver and pride.
Encuéntralo en la tienda
San Luis Potosi T-Shirt
Shop Smile Mas →Keep reading: Aguascalientes Gifts: For the Hidrocálido Who Carries Their Home With Them · Colima Gifts: For the Colimense Who Carries Their Home With Them · Nayarit Gifts: For the Nayarita Who Carries Their Home With Them