Country life always attracted Cantinflas. Throughout his life he tried on several occasions to become a rancher and in this sense, his best-known effort is the one he made with his La Purisima ranch, in Ixtlahuaca, state of Mexico. He bought this ranch in the sixties with the intention of raising wild cattle, driven by his taste for bullfighting.
But before that, Cantinflas had another farm in the 1940s, which rarely appears in the account of his life and properties since it was a failure that cost him a loss of more than two million dollars.
This property is located in Ciudad Valles, in San Luis Potosí, and to reach it, at that time, there was only a narrow dirt road which was paved by Cantinflas himself when he acquired the hacienda.
Biographers of Cantinflas have documented that these 100 hectares of land were bought by Cantinflas with his first large salary in the cinema, in particular with what he earned for “Ahí está el detail”, a 1940 film in which the Mime from Mexico consolidated his comic style based on the cantinflear.
For this reason, the ranch was given the name “The detail”. He built a main house with two stories and a dome, introduced planting machinery, and built houses for laborers and their families. His other great passion besides acting, bullfighting, also led him to build a small bullring that he named Cholita, in honor of his mother, whose name was Soledad.
The dream, however, lasted barely a decade. Overwhelmed by a plague that attacked his citrus plantations and the pressures and threats of a resentful politician (it is said that Gonzalo N. Santos persecuted him after Cantinflas won a bet in a horse race), the comedian decided to sell off his hacienda .
He sold it for 3 million dollars, that is, 2 less than what the land alone had cost him.
For years, the hacienda was abandoned where Cantinflas, in addition to the above, had built an Olympic-sized pool and a huge bar where he placed a giant screen to show his movies when his friends Jorge Negrete, María Félix, Pedro Infant.
Currently, the hacienda is in the process of being restored and can be visited for tourism purposes.