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El Triunfo
El Triunfo is located approximately 25 miles south of La Paz on the Transpeninsular highway to Los Cabos through Los Barriles.
Over a hundred years after silver was discovered in the southern Baja mountains at San Antonio, silver and gold were discovered in a nearby mountain area, soon to be called El Triunfo (The Triumph). The year was 1862, and the fever grew quickly as minors from other parts of Mexico and the United States set up camp to find their fortunes. Many of the miners who missed out on the California gold rush of 1849 came to El Triunfo for a second chance at striking it rich, along with those who had hit pay dirt in California, and wanted to try their luck again.
By 1865 this once-sleepy cattle ranch became a boom town of approximately ten thousand souls. It was, at the time, the largest settlement in all of southern Baja! After 60 some-odd years of mining, El Triunfo finally closed its operations in 1926. Today, as the Baja traveler visits the area, it seems difficult to picture this quaint collection of brick buildings as anything more than just another quiet Baja village. The buildings that are located right on Baja Highway One are very scenic, but the empty ghost-town feel of the area makes it hard to believe that over 400 people still call El Triunfo home.
The tall chimney, considered an engineering wonder was finished in 1892, after 32 years of construction under the design of Alexander Gustave Eiffel, and surrounding brick buildings just in from the south side of the highway are the remains of the old smelter. The interior ceilings of the smelter buildings are lined with dried smoke remnants several inches thick from the many decades of operation.
As we enter the new millennium, mining on a very small scale still takes place today in El Triunfo, a small reminder of the grand history of this very special Baja town.
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