In July of 1968, Marta began a massive project of painting a 16th-century royal audience on the walls, each with a different face. The audiences were modest, the first one consisting of twelve adults and children, but Marta had a plan.

Marta promptly settled down there and, having been a dancer and performer her whole life, began performing shows in the Opera House. The building seemed to be saying, ‘Take me… do something with me… I offer you life.’” “Peering through the tiny hole, I had the distinct feeling that I was looking at the other half of myself. It was obviously abandoned… and had been for some time.” She found herself “peering into the the old theater that would become the Amargosa Opera House. She soon found the old building and, drawn to it, noticed a hole in a door, where she could see inside.

While her husband attended to the tire, Marta wandered through the town. By 1925, the mining operation moved, and the town was left to be turned back into sand by the desert.īut this was not to be, for in the spring of 1967, Marta Becket and her husband found themselves stuck with a flat tire near the town of Amargosa. Originally part of the Pacific Coast Borax company town, the Amargosa served as the miners’ recreation hall, where church services, movies, dances, funerals, and town meetings all took place starting in 1923. But beyond these maintained areas, Death Valley Junction is in a state of disrepair. The hotel is operating, and the shows continue at the opera house: Resident Marta Becket staged dance and mime shows there since the late 1960s up until her death in February, 2017. Suffice to say, these are odd municipal statistics. The Amargosa, whose name stems from the Spanish word for “bitter” (amargo), is located in a town called Death Valley Junction - population: less than 20, restaurants: 0, gas stations: 0, opera house: 1. In the middle of Death Valley – one of the harshest and most extreme environments on earth – stands one of the most unusual hotels in America, the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel.

Amargosa opera house and hotel