Xilitla & Las Pozas: The Complete Guide to Mexico's Surrealist Jungle Garden (2026)

Edward Frank Willis James (1907–1984) grew up on a 6,000-acre English estate, went to Eton and Oxford, and inherited a mining fortune young. Society gossip whispered — and James playfully never denied — that he was the illegitimate grandson of King Edward VII. What is documented is stranger than the rumor: he became one of the most important patrons surrealism ever had.

• He bankrolled Dalí. Under a contract covering 1937–38, James agreed to buy Salvador Dalí's entire output — effectively funding the painter for a year — and collaborated on two icons of the movement: the Lobster Telephone and the Mae West Lips Sofa.
• Magritte painted him — twice. During a 1937 stay at James's London house, René Magritte produced Not to Be Reproduced, the famous painting of a man facing a mirror that reflects the back of his own head. The man is Edward James.
• He championed Leonora Carrington and assembled one of the greatest surrealist collections outside France — a detail that matters later in this story.

In the mid-1940s James drifted from New Mexico into Mexico. In Cuernavaca he hired Plutarco Gastélum, a Yaqui guide from Sonora, and in November 1945 the two reached Xilitla chasing reports of spectacular wild orchids. As James loved to tell it, a cloud of butterflies engulfed his bathing companion at a jungle pool — and he took it as a sign. In 1947 he bought the coffee plantation at Las Pozas.

Gastélum became the project's foreman and James's lifelong anchor in Mexico. He raised his family in El Castillo, the gothic-fantasy house he built in town — where "Uncle Edward" kept rooms for decades, and where you can sleep today (it is now the Posada El Castillo).

For fifteen years Las Pozas was, above all, an orchid plantation — James grew thousands of them and kept exotic animals (deer, flamingos, and famously snakes). Then, in 1962, an unprecedented frost killed the orchid collection overnight.

James's response defines the place: he resolved to build flowers that could never die — in concrete. From 1962 until his death in 1984, crews of local masons, carpenters and blacksmiths — more than 150 workers over the project's life, with carpenter José Aguilar carving the wooden molds — poured a fantasy of columns shaped like bamboo and orchids, gates, aqueducts, spiral stairs and towers among the waterfalls.

The guided circuit (~1.5 hours, groups of max 25) winds uphill past the essentials. Names matter here — James titled his follies like poems:

Below it all run the pozas themselves — the nine stepped waterfall pools that gave the place its name. You can photograph them from the paths, but swimming is no longer permitted.

When James died in 1984, the land passed to Plutarco Gastélum, who halted all construction. The garden opened informally to visitors in the early 1990s. In 2007 the Fundación Pedro y Elena Hernández, CEMEX and the San Luis Potosí state government bought the site for about US$2.2 million and created Fondo Xilitla, the trust that manages it today.

The honors piled up: State Cultural Heritage (2006), Mexico's UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List (2009), the World Monuments Fund Watch (2010) and Artistic Monument of the Nation (2012) — a designation rarely granted to 20th-century sites. Conservation is a permanent battle (concrete + jungle humidity + roots), which is exactly why the garden closes every Tuesday. Well over 100,000 people visit each year.