The museum focuses on early communities and individuals that came to this Ruta de Plata region. We place their stories in context with the larger history, from the arrival of the first settlers in the mid-1500s to the region’s boom years as a source of the world’s silver and gold.
The Ruta de Plata region encompasses the entire Cape Region on the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California Peninsula. See the 1866 map below. Bringing history to life, our emphasis is on the La Paz Municipality, the 4th largest municipality by area in Mexico, and includes villages, towns and countryside spanning the width of the peninsula, from the Pacific Coast across to the Gulf of California.
Learn how the promise of rich silver deposits in this region has attracted people from around the world for almost 500 years.
Arriving to participate in this propitious industry—to explore, to extract ores, to process, to ship—these individuals, and their activities, have greatly influenced the settlement of this part of Baja California Sur.
In 1532, Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés sent an expedition to the Baja California Peninsula as well as other locations. The map below is of the Manila Galleon Trade Route in the late 1500s.
Maris Pacifici map, circa 1589, public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia.
La Ramona and Julia smokestacks — two historic monuments in El Triunfo from the Ruta de Plata era