Madrid, New Mexico

Madrid (pronounced MA-drid, not ma-DRID) is a place unlike any other on Earth. The closest thing to a chronosynclastic infundibulum I’ve ever experienced, it’s at once a ghost town and a close-knit community, a hippie haven and a biker joint, a pile of junk and a work of art, an abandoned battleground in the war of Man vs. Nature and a fertile bed of new life… I stayed here just over a week, and took over a hundred photos.

Madrid is on the Turquoise Trail, a string of places throughout New Mexico that were originally mined by Native Americans 1,500 years ago. The Spaniards arrived in the 1500s and set up gold and silver mines, forcing native residents to work until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Still, Madrid was relatively unpopulated until coal and placer gold were discovered almost simultaneously around 1840.

Before long, Madrid was a full-fledged mining town. When the Santa Fe Railroad arrived, Madrid became the center for coal production between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. One Oscar Huber became the town’s patriarch and mine boss in the 1920s, and continued to run the place until the coal industry collapsed in the early 1950s.

Then Madrid became a ghost town for 20 years, until Huber’s son started to sell properties to artists and outsiders looking for a place that they could re-make in their own image.

And remake it they did: this is easily the most artistic town I’ve ever seen, and while nobody here seems rich beyond their wildest dreams, there’s an air of accomplishment and fulfillment among the artistic community. “Outsider art” means nothing here: in Madrid, any kind of creative expression goes.

It’s a tiny town, so you can go anywhere on foot. Cara and Morgan and I walked up the “back road”, to the top of Waldo Mesa where you can see for miles over expansive flatlands, arroyos, melting New Mexico mountains and striated rock outcroppings.

Walk far enough, and you’ll find yourself in the Madrid cemetery.

This graveyard tells the story of the town better than any historian could. Half of it is filled with rows of stone cairns, some with wooden crosses but most bare.

Some of the graves here have headstones, most of which are in Spanish. Many of them are handmade, and many haven’t been tended in years. A few have fences around them, but even those are mostly overgrown.

 

And then there’s the other half of the graveyard.

The place is littered with empty beer bottles and completely individualistic monuments made out of scrap metal and junk. The inscriptions are great: “traveling the highway.” “he was a little different.” “one for the road.”

While I was up there taking pictures, my camera died. I couldn’t get it to start up again. I pleaded with the haints to let me photograph their graves, but I guess some of them just didn’t want to be memorialized in pixels. Fair enough.

Madrid, like any good ghost town, is said to be haunted. Tales of ghosts in the Mine Shaft Tavern are widespread, and there have been ghost sightings around town for decades. La Lloroña is said to walk these streets, weeping and snatching children away to drown them.

But to me, this town felt completely alive, in a way I hadn’t felt in a while. Despite the dry, burnt ground, the coal slag heap, the signs of death and poverty everywhere, the people who live here aren’t afraid to build and create with junk, to find inspiration in the leftovers of the Industrial Age. They’ve got attitude around here, and audacity too— and as a result, their little town is packed to the gills with galleries, and beginning to assert itself as a tourist hotspot. It’s all too rare to find this kind of outré, joyful, slightly maniacal creativity in a fully-functioning town, and I felt very much at home there among the metal sculptures and dusty backroads.

So, I think, do Cara and Morgan, who let me stay with them in their big house for over a week. They’re artist types too, of the nomadic sort, and I think it would have been hard for them to set up camp in a “real” town. But in Madrid, putting down roots seems like it could be worth a shot.

There’s lots more detail on Madrid’s spotted history here, and much more importantly, all my photos here.