Navojoa residents 'buried' a man in a pothole – and 'El Piernudo' got it filled the next day
Residents in Navojoa, Mexico, stuffed jeans and trainers upside down into a huge pothole so it looked as if someone had fallen in. The council filled the hole the next day.
Most towns complain about potholes. In Navojoa, in Mexico’s Sonora state, residents took a more theatrical approach.
They stuffed a pair of jeans and trainers, upside down, into a huge hole in the road so it looked as if someone had fallen in head-first. Social media quickly dubbed the figure El Piernudo – “the leggy one” – Sonora Presente reported. La Jornada covered the protest on 7 November 2026.
Representative photo: Boulevard Álvaro Obregón in Navojoa (January 2009) – not the pothole at Morelos y Corregidora. Photo: Grosse / CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
AI illustration – imagined “El Piernudo”; not a photograph of the real jeans.
Police removed the figure that afternoon. The council filled and repaved the hole the next day. Whether that was the plan all along, or just an unusually prompt response to a pair of empty trousers, the street is at least smoother now.
AI illustration – imagined removal; not the actual officers or crowd.
We couldn’t possibly recommend the jeans method for a crater on your road. We can only observe that, in Navojoa, it appeared to work.
Reported by Sonora Presente and La Jornada (7 Nov 2026).
