Towering 2,000 meters above the surrounding fields, the Peña de Bernal resembles the Rock of Gibraltar or Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro. Nearly as tall, Bernal nonetheless is unique, being the only one of the three not rising out of the sea.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the peña attracts rock climbers. The risk sport of fashion in this new millennium, rock-climbing involves scrambling up perpendicular cliffs, accomplishing the seemingly impossible. People have fallen off the Peña of Bernal; some have been hurt, but none, according to local officials, ever have been killed.
This sounds nothing less than miraculous, but, then, the peña itself is considered miraculous. Believers gather there every year at the spring equinox to absorb some of its power. A better moment to visit is when there are no crowds and the magnetism of the peña need not be shared. And what does this magnetism do? Well, reportedly the inhabitants of Bernal live longer than most people. The town claims to be the home of more centenarians per capita than any other community in Mexico. Actually, according to a companion, people really do not live longer in Bernal. It simply seems that way. There is not very much to do.
Having nothing to do can be delightful, at least for a weekend. Harried souls from Mexico City leave their stresses at home when they flee to Bernal. By all means, bring a book to read. Bernal provides the perfect setting for finishing “War and Peace,” for instance.
In between, there are the shops to visit and many pleasant little restaurants. Bernal is famous for its weavers, men who work at ancient wooden contraptions looming cloth from yarn dyed in buckets. The industrial age stopped at San Juan del Rio, 40 kilometers away.
Opals, however, are the real treasures found in the shops of Bernal. Like the famous peña in whose shadow they are mined, the opals, too, are considered magical. There are opals that supposedly will bring back a lost love, cure what ails you or make the barren fertile. The Japanese lust after opals, so there must be something to these stories.
Other visitors from far off places apparently also believe this. Among the photographs decorating the walls in the local tourist office is a picture of what appears to be a flying saucer hovering over a field of cactus. You cannot really be sure this is near Bernal. The famous peña is not to be seen. The explanation is that this was toward the south of town, something like that. The mysterious visit, one learns, occurred sometime between 1980 and 1981. There really isn’t anything between 1980 and 1981, but perhaps we are quibbling over semantics. The climax of a film made back about then, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” was made in Bernal. Several Mexican movies really have been made there, among them classics that starred Maria Felix, Pedro Amendariz and Ignacio Lopez Tarso. More recently, the community has provided the backdrop for several television telenovelas. Photographs of the stars share the walls on which the flying saucer is displayed. When the film crews arrive, as you can well imagine, peace and tranquility vanish.
For some people, to be sure, the magic and tranquility of Bernal can prove to be overwhelming, like too much sugar in a cup of coffee. For them, the bright lights of Tequesquiapan are only minutes away. A spa town that not so many years ago promoted its own version of tranquility, Tequesquiapan today is the playground of Queretaro, one of the most industrialized cities in the republic. The Tequesquiapan hotels, while not really luxurious, are considerably more lavish.
Tequesquiapan has its own claim to magic, the local chamber of commerce proclaiming it to be the geographical center of Mexico. Aguascalientes and Guanajuato have their own claims in this respect and, being weak in geometry, I am no one to settle the question. Nor would I dare. No less a figure than Venustiano Carranza awarded Tequesquiapan the title while he was President in 1919. Of course, back when Don Venustiano was riding his white horse, Quintana Roo and all of Baja California were mere territories, not states of the union. Perhaps they were not included in the calculations. Perhaps we shall never know.
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