The story
Terlingua is two things at once: the ruins of a mercury-mining company town, and a small living desert community that grew up inside them. It sits on TX-170 just west of Big Bend National Park, and for most visitors it's the park's front porch.
Cinnabar — mercury ore — was found in the Big Bend country in the 1880s. By the 1900s Howard Perry's Chisos Mining Company owned Terlingua outright: the store, the houses, the water, and the terms of work for as many as 2,000 residents, most of them Mexican miners. Mercury demand spiked through two world wars, then the ore thinned and the company went bankrupt in 1942. Within a few years the town stood empty.
It didn't stay that way. The world-championship chili cook-off arrived in 1967, then river guides, artists, and people who wanted to be left alone. Today a few dozen residents live among the stone ruins, and the porch of the old trading post is one of the best places in Texas to watch the sun go down.
What remains today
The hillside of roofless stone miners' houses, the Perry mansion, the 1914 church, the trading post and Starlight Theatre, and the Terlingua cemetery — still in use, and famous for its Day of the Dead gathering.
From the archives
Town of Terlingua, Terlingua, Brewster County, TX
Funky art in the isolated Terlingua settlement, just north of Big Bend National Park in Texas's "Trans-Pecos"
Funky art in the isolated Terlingua settlement, just north of Big Bend National Park in Texas's "Trans-Pecos"
Funky art in the isolated Terlingua settlement, just north of Big Bend National Park in Texas's "Trans-Pecos"
Terlingua turns up on 226 digitized newspaper pages from Texas — read them free in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection.
Source: Library of Congress digital collections.
Questions from the field
- Do people live in Terlingua?
- Yes — a few dozen in the ghost town itself and more in the surrounding area. It's a living community inside a ruin: porch music at the trading post most evenings.
- When is the Terlingua chili cook-off?
- The first Saturday of November, in two rival events — a tradition since 1967 that briefly makes the ghost town one of the busier places in west Texas.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Terlingua — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Terlingua's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 1379150
- — Texas Historical Commission — Terlingua district
- — Brewster County records / Chisos Mining Co. history