Near the village of Xilitla in Mexico, in the heart of the rainforest, hides a wonderful surrealist garden, which appears as a place suspended between reality and fantasy. The brainchild of the British poet and artist Edward James, Las Pozas, built over 25 years, is a perfect blend of architecture and nature, a fantastic space that looks to the visitor like a sort of open-air art gallery.Xilitla is a nine-hour drive from Mexico City. It is pronounced Hilitla and is one of the 111 Pueblos Mágicos of the country. Hidden among the subtropical mountains of the Huasteca potosina, about 50,000 people live there, many of whom still speak Nāhuatl, a language of Aztec origin used in the Florentine Codex, the ethnographic masterpiece by Bernardino de Sahagún, written in the second half of the 1500s.The town has a square, a market, a former Augustinian convent from the 16th century and the Castillo, a villa on four levels without a precise architectural style: a bit eclectic, at times modernist, but also Art Nouveau; there are no stairs to descend, but large poles to slide down and it is all covered with plants. The owner, a rich Englishman, chose this corner of the world to settle his surrealist dream in the 1940s.
