HOUSTON — The closest community to the West Texas resort where Justice Antonin Scalia died is barely even a place anymore: It is a virtual ghost town where perhaps only a dozen people still live. And when a silver hearse drove across the rocks outside the Cibolo Creek Ranch on Saturday, it was from a funeral home at least an hour away.

“People go there with great confidentiality, I think,” said Teresa Todd, the city attorney for Marfa, more than 30 miles from the ranch. “People go there, and you’re not bothered.”

For years, public figures, including Justice Scalia and Mick Jagger, and wealthy, anonymous vacationers have descended on the 30,000-acre enclave of the Chinati Mountains. It is a place where remoteness is cherished, and where, without ever leaving the grounds, guests can spend weeks in historic adobe forts.

The ranch, first established in 1857 and used to defend against Native American tribes, fell into disrepair before its purchase in 1990 by John B. Poindexter, a manufacturing executive from Houston. Mr. Poindexter oversaw an aggressive restoration effort that transformed three forts into a retreat where rooms typically begin at $350 a night, and star gazing and horseback riding are among the preferred activities. (The amenities at the property, just north of the border with Mexico and close to the former mining town of Shafter, include a 5,300-foot airstrip.)

“If your goal is to get away and not be bothered and be in the lap of luxury,” Ms. Todd said, “it’s the perfect place.”

Yet some guests venture to Marfa, a city of fewer than 2,000 people with a funky culture, a penchant for the arts and a decidedly more cosmopolitan vibe.

“It doesn’t jibe, and it doesn’t conflict,” Jerry Patterson, a former Texas land commissioner, said of the secluded ranch’s relationship with Marfa. “There’s not many people out there. It’s an historic oasis in the middle of a very remote area of Texas.”

For all its inaccessibility, though, the property has been a hub for politicians and celebrities. Mr. Patterson, a Republican, has hunted quail at Cibolo Creek, and a member of the country band the Dixie Chicks was married there in 1999.

“My guess is, he has plenty of Republicans and Democrats hanging out together,” said a Texas senator, José Rodriguez, a Democrat from El Paso who has been to the ranch. He said that Mr. Poindexter has hosted a community event at the property each Labor Day that allowed residents to experience the rugged West Texas terrain and Mr. Poindexter’s careful efforts to restore structures now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“It’s a far West Texas, Big Bend landscape,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “It’s wide-open spaces. You see the silhouettes of mountains in the distance. I think people from Europe, from New York, are not used to seeing that sky.”

On Saturday, photographs published by The San Antonio Express-News showed a lone man, in a button-down shirt and bluejeans, seated in a white chair outside the gate to the resort. The man, the photographs showed, stood when the Cadillac hearse — presumably sent to ferry Justice Scalia’s body — passed the ranch’s stacked-stone fence.

Earlier in the day, a spokeswoman for the Diocese of El Paso said, a priest from a nearby parish was summoned to deliver the last rites for Justice Scalia.