The Island of the Dolls, in the canals of Xochimilco south of Mexico City, is one of the eeriest places in the country. A hermit named Don Julian Santana, who lived here alone, believed a girl had drowned in the canal and, to appease her spirit, began hanging dolls in the trees, hundreds of them over fifty years, now weathered, headless, sun-blackened, staring from every branch. He was found drowned in the same spot in 2001. You reach it only by trajinera (the flat-bottomed boats); it is a real, unsettling shrine, not a tourist stunt.
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