Xilitla Travel Guide

Las Pozas, at Xilitla in San Luis Potosí, is the private garden the English poet and Surrealist patron Edward James began building in the rainforest from the 1940s. Among waterfalls and pools he cast dozens of concrete structures — stairs that arrive nowhere, roofless colonnades, capitals opening like flowers — deliberately left to grow together with vines, ferns and running water. The grounds descend the valley in terraces, steep and slick, and walking them is like moving through a piece of architecture that refuses to obey function.