Mina Las Dos Estrellas

Las Dos Estrellas, just outside Tlalpujahua on the road to El Oro, was one of the richest gold mines in the world in the early 20th century. Its story began in 1898, when a miner working for the Frenchman François Joseph Fournier struck a rich vein. Within a few years the company that grew from it was producing gold and silver on a huge scale, and between about 1908 and 1913 it was counted among the top gold producers on the planet. The underground workings were so long that they reached across the state line into El Oro.

The boom ended badly. In 1937 a flow of mud and mine tailings buried a large part of Tlalpujahua and damaged the mine, and after the mine was taken over by the state, investment fell. It finally closed in 1959.

Today the site is a museum of 19th and early 20th century mining technology. You can step into a stretch of the original tunnel, look down a shaft, and walk through the old maintenance workshops and miners' houses, with photographs, documents and plans that show how the mine worked at its height.