July 9th – Santa Rosalía – Jim’s Blog #57

We have come to the last major town on the Baja side of the Sea of Cortez, which is called Santa Rosalía – the last one of any size from which we can provision our boat as we head further north into the Sea of Cortez. Santa Rosalía is an old copper mining town, originally financed by the Rothschilds in France in the latter part of the 1800’s. It had French management and engineers involved in creating one of the major copper-producing mines in the world in the early 1900’s. Currently the main industry here is squid fishing, with some manganese mining still going on. On the day we arrived, Santa Rosalía was celebrating the birthday of the town some 123 years ago (1885), and the backdrop on the stage that was set up for the dancers showed a cauldron of ore being poured on one side and a giant squid on the other.

A picture of me along with Debbie and Russ of 'Zephyra' and Cornelia and Ed of 'A Cappella' in front of one of the engines used to tow the ore cars out of the mines - as we head out on the town


What kind of dancing do you suppose we saw that evening? Not Mexican, not Flamenco, but belly dancing by some young girls who didn’t appear to have any bones in their bodies – they were so flexible. We’re still trying to understand how belly dancing fits into the Mexican culture. And these girls were tall and flexible in comparison with the short, rather stocky Mexican women one sees in these towns. These dancers had been brought in on a “cultural exchange” program of some sort, probably performing in fiestas around Mexico during the summer for a stipend for their organization. They certainly didn’t look like the typical Mexican girls that we have seen.

The French influence is quite strong here and the town is unlike any of the other Mexican towns we’ve seen. No adobe buildings that look as if they emerged from the soil, as we have seen everywhere else! Most of the buildings are made of wood that was imported from the Pacific Northwest, since the place has no natural resources other than the ore that was discovered in 1868. The French built company homes for the workers, whom they imported from neighboring towns. They also had had to import all building materials, mining materials, water, and food for the workers. A smelter was built near the port, which was responsible for covering the town in dirty soot while it was operating. Nowadays, it seems to be a fairly clean little town.

One interesting fact about the town is that it was built by engineers rather than architects; so there was little thought given to quality of life versus the expediency of getting the ore out with the minimum effort necessary. Identical houses were built for the workers with the minimum rooms necessary to house them when they weren’t in the mines. We noticed a graveyard at the top of the nearest hill overlooking the town and sitting on the mine itself. Apparently putting the dead on top of the hill was a way to avoid having bodies in the way down below in case the management needed to run a railroad track through a ravine or around a hill.

A shorter Eiffel Tower on the church in Santa Rosalía


The church is famous because of the engineer who designed it, Alexander Gustave Eiffel. Yes, he’s the same person who designed the Eiffel tower in Paris. In this case he had designed a galvanized iron church for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. The French consortium running the mine bought the church in the 1990’s, broke it down into sections, and shipped it around Cape Horn to Santa Rosalía, where it was reassembled and still stands. Apparently the early French managers had not planned for a church, but the rumbles of dissent from the townspeople caused later managers to reconsider and purchase the church. It is painted white on the outside to reflect the sun, but it still seems quite hot inside.

We took some time while in the marina here to defrost the refrigerator, which was beginning to smell a little too much like dead fish and was not making ice very well. In doing that we discovered that one of our gallon plastic oil bottles in the bilge had sprung a slow leak and had covered the bottom of the bilge with an inch or so of water and oil combined. We discovered that our plastic bilge pump was nearly useless in getting the oil out of the bilge, so we had to soak up the oil in oil pads and rags to get the bilge clean. This is one of those examples of what can happen to increase the scope of a small one-hour project to one that takes half a day or more.

We also discovered that a large bird decided to take up residence on top of our mast, announcing its presence with large white splotches on the deck. We dislodged the bird by pounding on the forestay, but it took several repetitions of this process to get him to move to another boat. I am now considering ways to send a jolt of electricity up the mast in the future, but I’m afraid of what it might do to our radar and the wind instruments at the top. The best approach we’ve heard of is to put up sharp-pointed, stiff wires at the top of the mast to make it a highly uncomfortable place to land.

We climbed to the top of the French Mesa this morning to view the museum, where we saw mining equipment, pictures of miners from long ago, and even office equipment from that time. We saw a Royal typewriter that was at least 100 years old, along with a calculating machine, an old ammeter, a primitive telephone and switchboard, and many other objects. There was a gas tester with several tubes indicating the types of gas each tube was supposed to test – this had been manufactured in Glendale, California, and looked remarkably well-made for an instrument that was 100 years old.


Sheilagh in front of the Hotel Francés along with another locomotive from the old mine


We also visited the Hotel Francés, which had been rebuilt in 1920 after a fire. It is a two-story structure that duplicates the original building, and is an operating hotel today at $65 a night. It has rooms around an internal courtyard with a square “swimming pool” in the middle. There is no room to do any real swimming in the pool; so I imagine it is used as a way to cool off periodically when reading on one of the lounge chairs.

The inner courtyard of the Hotel Francés

Everywhere in Santa Rosalía are large pieces of mining equipment on display from the turn of the last century. I could swear the townspeople have put a sign on every piece of broken down equipment in town rather than cart it away to be disposed of.

But now the industries are tourism and squid fishing. The squid fishermen go out in their pangas at twilight with bright lights on their boats to attract the squid to the surface. We can see dozens of lights flickering over the surface of the water offshore each evening. We can tell when they return because the processing of the squid causes a stench that seems to linger over the marina until a wind comes up. The water in the marina is not anything I would swim in, and we are a bit tired of trying to ignore the smell. Tomorrow we will be heading north to get into clean air and water once again. We will be cruising up in the Bay of Los Angeles (“Angeles” is pronounced with a hard “g”) for the next few weeks before we sail back to the mainland side of Mexico to put up our boat for a couple of months and return to the U.S. We’ll have a few more blogs before that happens. More later . .