Staycation: Borrego Springs' Sky Art

Smilodon attacks Equus

On the way to the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Visitor's Center, we happened upon a series of captivating metal sculptures bordering the Borrego Springs Road.  When we arrived at the Visitor's Center we discovered there is whole series of these whimsical sculptures designed by Mexican artist Ricardo Breceda.

It all began when local Borrego Springs resident Dennis Avery, heir to the Avery Dennison label company, came across Breceda's roadside metal scultpures along the freeway.  He commissioned Breceda to create a metal sculpture of the gomphothere, an extinct elephant-like creature that used to roam the area. Avery liked what he saw, and put the gomphoteres on his Galleta Meadows property. That was in 2008, and between 2008 and 2010, Breceda created 131 sculptures that now dot Galleta Meadows.  The property is private and undeveloped, but open to anyone that wants to view the sculptures.

Extinct horse that roamed Borrego Springs before it became a desert.

Avery was an enthusiastic historian of the Plio-Pleistocene age of Borrego Springs, and so he initially asked Breceda to recreate sculptures of extinct animals that once roamed the Anza-Borrego Desert. But soon Breceda branched out to dinosaurs which never roamed the area,  and miners and Indians , a Spanish Padre, farmworkers, insects, a Saguaro cactus, and Captain Juan Bautista de Anza himself. Perhaps his most well known sculpture is a 350 foot Chinese sea serpent with a rattlesnake tail that "dives" under the road.   His last sculpture for the collection was a 1946 Jeep.

Samuel inspects Equus up close.