The tour takes you 60 meters down into the mine, which is why Dorothy let me go alone. There is no way she could have made it back up. I could, however, have used her much better Spanish, as the guide, an ex-miner, spoke zero English. Still, I managed to understand enough, and even asked a few questions. And got answers I understood. Or at least I think I did.

There is literally no way to grasp the mine’s scale. It’s been worked for 100s of years, and goes down a full mile. Having descended, and then come back up, just 60 meters, I cannot possibly wrap my head around its scale.

Visually, the mine doesn’t offer much up. What’s most notable is the various tiny crawl spaces that the miners were expected to work inside. I’m sure there’s no such thing as Fun Mining, but still.

But the true star of Valenciana is outside the mine: the San Cayetano church. This is such a great story. The church was completed in 1788, and was funded by the owner of the Valenciana mine, Antonio de Ordóñez y Alcocer. The mine was actually abandoned in 1559, just a year after opening, as the owners at the time believed it had been played out.

Ordóñez reopened the mine in 1760 and promptly, 80 meters down, hit the largest silver vein in all of Mexico. You’ll be surprised to learn that this made him fabulously wealthy, and prompted King Carlos III to honor him as nobility. Because what’s more noble than being rich? Henceforth, Ordóñez was known as the Count of La Valenciana and Viscount of the Mine. Sadly, Duke of Slavery was already taken.

Yep, while some of the miners were paid, many were enslaved indigenous and African peoples. Remember I said this was a great story? Well, the payoff is that Ordóñez built the church, he said, for the miners. So the enslaved miners could pray (whatever did they need to pray for?) to the Christian god to whom they had been forcibly converted. Noblesse fucking oblige.

But I can’t discuss San Cayetano without first issuing an apology to Oaxaca’s Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán. I was foolish enough to refer to the Guzmán as “the Liberace of churches.” San Cayetano has exposed the stupidity of that designation, and I sincerely apologize to both churches for my youthful misapprehension. San Cayetano, you are the true champion.

San Cayetano may be the finest example of the Spanish Churrigueresque style of architecture, sometimes known as Ultra Baroque. Because, Baroque… sometimes it just doesn’t say what you want it to say, you know? It’s probably the gaudiest example, as its three massive altarpieces are completely covered in gold leaf. No, completely covered.

Here’s a walkthrough…

And here’s some eye searing detail. First up, the interior view. I love how it centers the primary altar under a beautiful dome (which is one component of the excellent use of light), while completely hiding the two side altars, whose placement represents the cross. The reveal of the side altars once you’re up on the main altar is perfection.

Next up, the Big Kahuna, the main altar:

And the two side altars:

And let’s not ignore the exterior, which, despite the notable absence of gold leaf, is plenty Ultra Baroque, thank you very much.

It is, sadly, the typical story with Colonial works. We’ve been marinating in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, but we’re not going to find anything different in Africa or India, or wherever. The beauty often comes with an ugly backstory.

On my first visit to India I was in Kolkata for work, but I’d arranged a weekend there for sightseeing. I had a driver, because that is 100% the safest way to traverse India. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where the traffic actually frightened me.

I had a list of places I wanted to visit on Saturday, but my driver took me to his hot spots on Sunday. One of them was a beautiful Raj-era English church. Which baffled me. Did he take me because he thought I’d be comforted by some classic Western architecture? *wrong* Did he genuinely find it beautiful and worth sharing? And if so, how was it possible for him to enjoy it as an artifact bereft of its context?

Because I couldn’t. I was profoundly uncomfortable, on top of just not being very interested in classic English church design. I didn’t quiz my driver on his motives (because I’m not actually a dick), but I stayed for the minimum amount of time necessary to show respect and then moved on.

I feel like our travels are destined to constantly bump into the ravages of Colonialism. But what’s the alternative? If we only traveled to parts of the world that didn’t rub our noses in Colonialism, we’d be back in the US already. Not that there’s any residue of Colonialism to worry about there. As our ill-fated attempt to visit all the Missions in California proved.

I mean, Europe? They’ve just been colonizing and recolonizing one another in a great circle jerk of fuck-you for millennia. You can still see Roman baths in England, although it’s kind of tough to feel any sympathy for the British. Over anything.

So we’re just going to have to rub some dirt in it and walk it off. As much revulsion as the remains of Colonialism genuinely inspire, that truth is as much a part of the history of the places we’ve visited, and will visit, as anything else. It needs to be understood and confronted, not ignored because it’s unpleasant.

I was expecting to learn things on this adventure. I didn’t expect to be as angry as I often seem to be. Although I suppose that’s the natural consequence of looking at anything closely. I guess I was expecting this to be all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, and didn’t account for how much seamy underbelly we’d be forced to embrace.

And I’ll leave you with that heartwarming visual as a parting gift.

San Miguel de Allende is about an hour outside of Guanajuato. It’s a picturesque mountain town that’s home to the peak capitalism version of Gringotenengo, with one of the largest expat communities in Mexico, representing a full 10% of the total population. Guess what else San Miguel is known for? Mexico’s most severe income inequality. But I’m sure there’s no connection.

San Miguel also offers the strongest contrast we’ve yet encountered between surface and subtext. Its surface is, objectively, beautiful. Like Guanajuato and Oaxaca, San Miguel is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and is well deserving of the designation. The mountain setting is gorgeous, the streets are wide and clean, and the buildings are all in beautifully restored condition. It is the tidiest city we’ve visited in Mexico. In theory, there’s nothing not to like. Except that the whole effect has more than a whiff of EPCOT to it. It’s been cleaned and curated for the benefit of everyone except the native residents.

Then there’s the subtext, which is that expats, at scale, are a destructive force. Like locusts. A few are fine, but once they’ve settled on your town, you’re fucked. Unsurprisingly, a huge part of the income inequality is driven by housing costs. New construction is almost exclusively luxury housing, with prices starting at about $500k USD and going up, way up, from there. That’s obviously unattainable for locals, whose average income is about $270 USD/month.

Of course, it’s not just expats skewing housing construction. It’s also tourists screwing the rental market. Like many popular tourist locations, San Miguel’s long-term rentals have been turned into short-term Airbnbs, taking them off the rental market and further driving up prices for the remaining stock.

The tourism pattern is also notable. The 10% of the local population that’s expats is American, Canadian, and European. In other words, overwhelmingly white. The same holds true for the tourists. While there are clearly Mexican tourists, there are a lot of white people in San Miguel, especially compared to the other cities we’ve visited. Oaxaca had its share of gringo tourists, but a fraction of San Miguel’s. And in Chetumal and Guanajuato, we’ve gone weeks without seeing any other gringos.

Which brings up one of the things we specifically didn’t care for about San Miguel, and which, I think, reflects poorly on us. We are, truth be told, gringos. And while we’re not following a tourist cadence, we are to all appearances tourists. Spending time in relatively gringo-light locations means that we don’t see ourselves reflected. But in San Miguel, we were surrounded by our doppelgängers. Everywhere Dorothy looked, there were women of a certain age in straw hats and graying blond hair. Everywhere I looked, there were men of a certain age in shorts and baseball caps. This is why we don’t selfie. We know what we look like in context, and we don’t care to be reminded. In San Miguel, there’s no avoiding the ugly truth. We’re tourists.

The clash between surface and subtext plays itself out most violently in the retail space. It’s not like there are no goods and services that cater to locals, but the imbalance towards high-end retail is pronounced. Throughout the entire Centro, it seems like every other building houses a boutique. Not handicrafts shops, boutiques, beautifully curated and displayed, with goods from all over the world, not just Mexico. We saw some amazing Italian glass, but buying Italian crafts in Mexico in order to mule them back to the US just didn’t make any sense to us.

The entire effect is very Calle Rodeo. Because it’s not just the quality of the goods, it’s the pricing. San Miguel doesn’t just appeal to expats in general. It appeals to incredibly wealthy expats, which is another key factor impacting the local economy.

Just a few blocks from our hostel was an amazing compound called Fábrica La Aurora. It occupies a massive old textile factory, and has been broken up into literally dozens of gallery spaces. Fine arts, housewares, local handicrafts, antiques, imports… The range was astonishing and the quality was breathtaking.

As were the prices. We found a gallery that featured a single artist, Marilo Carral. She makes paintings, jewelry, shrines, and a beautiful fiber-based take on the traditional plastic Acapulco chair.

We loved her work, but knew it was out of our range. To say nothing of the shipping costs. However, there was a small 8″x8″ oil painting that I thought might be attainable, so I asked. $1,200. As for the above, we checked out the prices on her website. Chair: $1,200. Settee: $2,250. Painting: $9,600. Which is one of her cheaper paintings, which top out at $22,000. Also notable: everything priced in USD. They know their customer.

Those prices aren’t unreasonable for real art. Not at all. And everywhere we’ve been has had a few “real” galleries that specialized in fine art, and were, I’m sure, priced similarly. But the sheer concentration, the density of this class of retail in San Miguel was like nothing we’ve seen.

The Elephant In The Room Is A Cathedral

I’ve gone this far without mentioning San Miguel’s most iconic visual element, Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel. It dominates the Centro and can be seen from all over town.

The church itself was built in the 1600s with a traditional Mexican facade. Its current ridiculous pink sandstone Gothic skin was added in 1880. Nearly every news source you can find tells the same story: that the local architect who designed the facade, Zeferino Gutierrez, was inspired by postcards of Antoni Gaudi’s Gothic folly, la Sagrada Família in Barcelona. The only problem with this story is that Gaudi didn’t begin work on the Sagrada until 1883, and worked on it his whole life. Gutierrez may well have been inspired by postcards of Gothic European churches, but Sagrada wasn’t among them.

The interior was similarly Liberace themed. The Spanish certainly knew how to wow the natives.

It’s charms notwithstanding, it was impossible for us to feel anything but ambivalent about San Miguel. The expat assault occurred before the city had any reasonable chance to develop policies to defend itself, and the damage has been largely done. It’s not at all clear whether there’s anything the city can do at this point to roll it back.

Ultimately, I’m glad we went, it for no other reason than the object lesson it provided in what happens when we take our belief systems with us when we move. We are the ultimate invasive species, and, like kudzu, will destroy whatever environment we deposit ourselves in.

It’s funny, because one of the reasons we undertook this adventure was that we were sick to death of the predations of third wave capitalism, and wanted to experience how the rest of the world managed itself. The sad answer is, just fine, until we show up in numbers. It’s helped make us super aware of treading lightly and minimizing our impact, and that’s a good thing.

There are multiple ways to get up to the park that houses the statue, but only one of them is frightening. Most people, I think, take a car or taxi, but you can also walk. You’d have to be both much younger and much more masochistic than we are to try walking up the switchback steps from the base to the summit.

But there’s a funicular… that’s the adventurer’s option. It’s the old-fashioned counterweight style. There is one up car and one down car, and they always balance one another out.

This is the view looking up. Vertiginous, no? And I have something of a history with vertigo. So Dorothy looks at that, looks at me, and asks, “Do you think you can?” And I’m a fucking idiot, so I say, “Of course! Are you OK with it?” “Yeah, I guess so.” So, merry idiots, we march forward to our assured doom.

But it was nothing. In fact, it was fun. But what’s funny is we agonized over whether this was a good idea, and it was fine, but then waltzed into the mummies exhibit like it was a picnic, and that shit was deeply disturbing. That’s where playing all four quarters of the mental game might have paid off.

Once up top, there are two things going on: communing with El Pípila his own self, and the view. He looks big from the bottom, but he’s… really big up close. I’m not sure whether that 20 meter measurement includes the base or not, but either way, that’s a lot of statue.

But the view… This is unquestionably the best view of the city.

So, What’s This Guy’s Story?

El Pípila’s story is pretty good. So, Spain, war of independence, yada yada yada. This may be reductive, but I think the Mexican Spanish wanted the right to abuse the indigenous population without having to get permission from the mothership. You know, independence.

So, just outside Guanajuato, one Father Miguel Hidalgo raised an army to take it to the Spanish, and marched into the city unchecked. The Spanish forces, along with the citizens who owned enough wealth and property to side with the royalists, retreated to the town’s granary, the Alhóndiga de Granaditas. Thus began the Siege of the Alhondiga.

To be fair, this is a very imposing building, with thick walls and the high ground. But this move still seems pretty idiotic. The Spanish forces permitted themselves to be surrounded, holed up in a fortress with no ability to resupply. Rooftop soldiers were able to keep the rebel forces from approaching the entrance, but the stalemate was only going to last as long as their food.

Enter El Pípila, a miner whose actual name was Juan José de los Reyes Martínez. An impatient fellow, he was unwilling to wait for the Spanish to starve, so he grabbed a torch and some pitch, strapped a large stone to his back to protect himself from them muskets, and crawled to the front door. A strategic application of pitch and torch burnt the entrance wide open, whereupon the superior rebel forces (20,000 rebels to 300 royalists) entered and slaughtered every one of the inhabitants, soldier and civilian alike. And then, because they had some free time, they pillaged the city.

This was the first victory for the rebels in the war for independence from Spain, but it was hardly the end of things. In fact, in some ways, it set the rebel cause back. It seems there were plenty of folk who craved an omelet but were squikked by the breaking of eggs. It’s not like the tactics employed were tuned to capture hearts and minds. In fact, Hidalgo had planned to march on Mexico City, but wasn’t sure he could control the forces he’d mustered.

Plus, the Spanish didn’t turn tail and flee at the first sign of discontent. The siege occurred in September 1810. The Mexican declaration of independence was executed in September 1821, eleven bloody years later.

But that’s not the end of the story for our heroes. Miguel Hidalgo and his three chief co-conspirators were captured by the Spanish and executed, their decapitated heads displayed at the four corners of Alhóndiga de Granaditas. The heads were left up for the entire period of the revolution. (“I shall see your brutality, sir, and raise you butchery”). Miguel’s would have looked down over the plot of land that now houses the Mercado Hidalgo. Named after him. So… happy ending!

Alhóndiga de Granaditas

Today, the Alhóndiga is a museum, compressing history from pre-Colonial to post-Colonial into a nice, tight package. It’s made from the green and pink striated sandstone native to the area, which is no less beautiful for being ubiquitous.

I’ll admit I’m not a big fan of celebrating the Colonial era in post-Colonial sites. There’s only so many portraits of Colonial nobles and so many artifacts from the Hall of Overdesigned Furniture I can process before it all curdles. The “servile veneration of European stupidity,” indeed.

The pre-Colombian exhibits, though, were well worth the trouble. The first hall was full of sellos, or seals. These were used to transfer patterns to textiles, paper, and ceramics, but they’re also wonderful artifacts in their own right.

The remainder of the pre-Colombian exhibits were primarily ceramics. Because the wooden stuff didn’t make it. It is, of course, impossible to know how these pieces were viewed at the time, but from our vantage point the design and execution read as playful. Even the sellos above have a notably jaunty profile. The premier collection of pre-Colombian art has to be Diego Rivera’s Museo Anahuacalli, but for a small collection, the Alhóndiga is lovely.

And then there are… these.

“Do you like this? You want some of this, don’t you?”

I had confessed to my sister and niece recently that my long-thwarted, lifelong ambition was to write fiction, but that I was crippled by a lack of imagination. They assured me that I was more than capable (so if I ever do try my hand at fiction, you know who to blame), but I swear there’s a novel in this portrait.

What is it about this? Is it the defiant poses of three girls in front? The crossed knife and fork on the Napoleonic chapeaux? The slightly abashed expressions on our boys? All of it? I want to know WTF is going on, but I also don’t want to know, so I can tell my own story. Perhaps I will.

What distinguishes the Guanajuato mummies from your standard issue Egyptian mummies is that they weren’t intentionally mummified. Also, that they’re just out there hanging around, not wrapped up and hidden in sarcophagi. Like the good mummies.

There are two origin stories about the mummies, and they may both be correct. They share in common that the cemetary (panteón) started charging families annual fees, and when families couldn’t pay, or there was no family, the bodies were disinterred. To everyone’s surprise, what they found wasn’t a pile of bones, but fully mummified corpses.

In one version, the bodies were buried in above ground crypts. When they were disinterred, the dry, warm mountain air turned out to have created the perfect conditions for natural mummification. In the other version they were buried in the ground, as god intended, and the dry soil led to their mummification. A variant on this version is that many of the corpses were buried as a result of a cholera epidemic, and were buried in such haste that no one bothered with the salts that are usually used to speed decomposition and absorption.

Whatever the specifics, the result was over 100 mummies, and it’s axiomatic that any number of mummies over, say, none, is a tourist attraction. The Guanajuato mummies have been on display since 1894.

And How Does That Make You Feel?

What’s disturbing about the mummies isn’t that they’re corpses. It’s that they’re displayed as objects, not people. Of course, when they were first disinterred the panteón knew who they were. Each deadbeat had a name. Over the years, with the lax handling and the absence of give-a-fuck, their names have been lost. They’re just archetypes now: El Ahogado (The Drowned Man), La China (The Chinese Lady), La Bruja (The Witch).

Thankfully, not everyone is OK with the current state of affairs. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History has undertaken an effort to identify the remains and, when it’s possible to locate living descendants, return them to their families. Just the effort is already more dignity than they’ve been afforded since death.

It also warrants pointing out that El Museo is hardly alone in this sort of reassessment. Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, which features medical curiosities, is undertaking a critical reassessment of how it displays and contextualizes exhibits featuring human remains. Cue howls about the Woke Police.

In the meantime, the display at El Museo De Las Momias has more in common with pornography than anthropology. It’s a form of objectification that makes the viewer complicit in the act.

Trigger Warning

There’s a reason I used a photo of a mural outside the Museo for the featured image on this post, rather than an objectively more arresting photo of one of the actual mummies. Because, people, these are corpses. With hair and teeth and clothes. And eyes. *shudder* And truly horrifying expressions. They are disturbing. There is no shame in bailing. No one will know. So do not scroll any further if this is a thing you don’t want to see.

For the rest of you, fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Nothing

To

See

Here

I’d

Scroll

Back

Up

If

I

Were

You…

Still Here? Good.

The few, the brave, the foolish. Welcome, my band of brothers. To something you can never unsee. This is on you.

And… Nothing more needs to be said.

That’s never really true, is it.

I had originally written clever captions for each of the photos. There was some pretty good stuff there. Knee slappers, if you will. But I’ve deleted them. They made me feel… dirty. And not in the good way.

It felt like I was just heaping one more indignity on folks who didn’t deserve it. It felt like… a feeling. And you all know how ambivalent I am about having feelings. So if funny captions make feelings, no funny captions. Sorry. You’ll have to write your own.

We had a different response this time, when we left Chicago after Dorothy’s right hip replacement. It was more like, “Aaah, we’re back where we belong.” Managing the routine of not having a routine.

I think we were both surprised at how much it felt like we were coming home, even though we’ve never been here. The closest comparison I can make is that if felt like getting remarried after we’d gotten divorced.

Relationship math says that you’re on solid ground if the positives outweigh the negatives. But the negatives are still there, still a source of friction. The thing about getting remarried was that it involved a very conscious calculus, not so much a willingness to accept the negatives as a part of the deal, and more the acknowledgement that continuing to give the negatives weight was just stupid. They exist, but they’ve been intentionally chosen, with full knowledge of the alternatives, and not grudgingly accepted.

Living this lifestyle is much the same. We’re gaining things of real value, but we’ve both had to give up things that matter to us: a settled home, a weekly boardgame night, a fully stocked sewing room, time spent apart, the ability to speak to other people in our native tongue, a fully stocked liquor cabinet, time spent apart…

After seven weeks in the US, our primary response to Guanajuato was relief. It was the understanding that the things we’ve given up weren’t just costs we were willing to absorb, but that they didn’t even matter. They’ve been chosen, rather than accepted. We’re now relaxed into this adventure in the same way we relaxed into our second marriage. Although it’s unlikely to last as long.

The Apartment

We have another bedsit, like in Chetumal, but without even the room divider we had there. It’s more like a hotel room with a kitchenette than an apartment. We’re only here five weeks, so it’s fine, but I think it would be a little claustrophobic if we were here three months.

I’ve mentioned before that part of our settling in process involves picking up whatever housewares we need to cover what’s missing in a new apartment. We just leave those behind when we exit, and consider it the cost of being comfortable while we’re there. You can see in the budget I’ve posted what some of those costs look like for representative months, but I thought I’d provide a little more detail this time.

For this apartment we picked up: a pitcher for tea, a compost pail (most everywhere we go the trash cans don’t seal well, so if we don’t keep organic waste covered we get flies, but we don’t actually compost), two bath towels, a large skillet (we’ve left behind a large skillet in almost every apartment – we’re going to see if we can shed enough weight to make room for it when we leave), a small rolling cart (you can see it under the sink in the photos above – very poor storage in this apartment), a serving tray (to use as a lap desk on the sofa), hangers (another thing we always have to buy and leave behind), two tumblers, and four melmac bowls. Total cost: $63.52 for a five week stay. Obviously, the longer we stay someplace (we’re five weeks here, but three months is our target) the less money we churn doing this.

Also, through no fault of our hosts, we scored our first scorpion on this trip. One step closer to completing our International Travel Bingo card.

So close!

The Elephant In the Bathroom

Or, Is Geography Destiny?

Guanajuato is not the only city in the world carved into a mountainside. There’s La Paz, Quito, Setenil de las Bodegas, Sana’a… But it may be the most colorful, and it’s the only one we’ve visited, so it’s obviously special.

Guanajuato has been occupied for thousands of years, but the city proper dates from the 1500s, and has the Colonial architecture to prove it. The area was rich with silver and gold deposits, which were utilized by the Aztecs and their forebears prior to the Spanish. Leave it to the Spanish to industrialize the process, exploiting both the resources and the population.

At its peak, a single Guanajuato silver mine, La Valenciana, churned out 2/3 of worldwide production. This was no Silver Rush. Over a 250 year period, La Valenciana alone produced 30% of the world’s silver. Unsurprisingly, Guanajuato was Mexico’s richest city at the peak of silver production in the 1800s.

The steep mountainsides forced the residential equivalent of terrace farming, with successive layers of housing climbing up the mountain. That’s where the mountain in our bathroom comes from – our building is literally clinging to the rocks.

What’s not clear is why that pattern required that the housing be connected by narrow alleys instead of actual streets. Density is surely one reason. Narrowing the pathways permitted more housing to be built, and I’m sure the labor demands of mining at scale required lots of housing. While the climate is mountain temperate, Guanajuato is pretty high up, and the narrow alleys also tend to reduce the impact of the sun and promote cooling. Maybe it was for defensive purposes. Maybe nobody was paying attention, and it just happened.

Whatever the origin story, the narrow alleys have all kinds of practical impacts. First, there’s no way to navigate a car, or any kind of vehicle, or even a cart, up into the web of alleys. If you want something in your home, you carry it up. Although I did see a pair of pack mules, which makes perfect sense. But I also saw men carrying loads of concrete blocks up the stairs on their backs.

Services are another challenge. Somehow, they’ve managed to make electric, water, sewer, and internet service available. But there’s no trash pickup. When I asked our host what to do with our trash, we were instructed to take it to a parking lot three blocks away and ask for Cuco.

On the other hand, this is how electric is distributed.

But it’s honestly hard to grasp the landscape from still photos. OK, there are some narrow alleys. So what? This video should provide more of the full experience. As I approach, the opening is so narrow it just looks like the gap between buildings. Then you see stairs, and it just has to be leading to someone’s front door. But, no. It’s actually part of the legitimate navigational terrain.

In acknowledgement of the steep alleys and the high altitude (Did I mention the altitude? We’re at over 6,700 feet, a mile and a quarter up. Mexico City is only about 600 feet higher. We are officially at ass-kicking altitude), the alleys are positively pavéd with benches. They’re a lovely amenity, not a grudging afterthought, and they are 100% lifesavers.

Guanajuato is also a fairly rainy climate. When we moved in, our host cautioned us to keep our windows closed when we weren’t in, to make sure rain didn’t enter. Which made no sense. The alleys are so narrow, rain can fall down, but there’s just no space for the wind to whip it sideways.

Then we had our first rainstorm.

The narrow alleys act as spillways, channeling the rainfall into rapids. We had to close the windows because we were getting whitewater splashing in from the current, not from the sky.

The narrow alleys have also spawned a local Romeo & Juliet legend, centered on El Callejón del Beso, the Alley of the Kiss. This alley is so narrow that the opposite balconies practically touch. In fact, they’re so close it’s possible for two people to kiss across the gap.

The story goes that a wealthy businessman planned to marry his daughter off to another geezer, but she fell in love with a poor miner. Dad confined his daughter to her bedroom to keep him at bay, but the enterprising miner bought the building next door, and they met every night. Dad caught them and killed his daughter. Because kids, am I right?

Nowadays the tourist trap legend says that if you kiss on the third step of the Callejón you’ll get 15 years of great relationship mojo, but a kiss on any other step and you’re fucked. Duh.

The Neighborhood

When we were planning this adventure I read as many travel blogs as I could, to pick up helpful tips and tricks. I’m happy to learn from other people’s mistakes. I don’t insist on only heeding my own.

One of the tips I read, which seemed to make a lot of sense, was to never book your accommodations for the length of your stay in advance. Instead, pick up a week’s Airbnb, then look around once you get there to find the right place for the rest of the stay. The theory being that there’s no way to tell without being there whether a neighborhood is safe, or convenient, or desirable. Hedge your bets.

Aspirationally, that was advice I really wanted to follow. Practically, we haven’t done it yet. Just the thought of getting off an airplane, unpacking into an Airbnb, and then sprinting for the next week to find longer term housing, so we could pack up, move, and resettle yet again… I’m exhausted describing it. We decided we’d rather settle for a less than perfect neighborhood than have to run that particular gauntlet.

But here’s the weird thing: so far, every single apartment we’ve rented has been in the absolutely perfect location. Once we know the city, we always say, “This is the location we’d have picked if we actually knew anything.” I know it’s better to be lucky than good, and we’ve been attributing this outcome to luck. But it’s been so consistent that it’s starting to look like a weird, inexplicable skill instead.

I’ll regret that, because I’ve now guaranteed that our next neighborhood will be a shithole (looking at you, Rosarito Beach). It’s not like I don’t understand how hubris works. A seemingly indifferent universe can rouse itself and notice you, which never ends well. But at least this time, we fell into a pot of jam once again. Our apartment here is ideally situated.

There are small tiendas dotted everywhere, selling everything from housewares to produce. Compared to Oaxaca, there are fewer restaurants but more little shops and street vendors. We also have a Soriana supermercado a few blocks away, and just two blocks further is Mercado Hidalgo, the main traditional mercado. The structure was originally designed as a train station, but by the time construction was complete in 1910 they were like “Fuck the trains. It’s a mercado!” It’s been in continuous service since.

We are also, as fate has decreed, very close to ice cream. In fact, except for up, it doesn’t matter what direction we walk from our apartment, we hit ice cream in a matter of minutes. If we’re not careful we’ll need a bigger apartment than we’re planning for in Chicago when this is all over. Just to have enough room for our hideously ice cream bloated selves.

Once again, we’re also in the rosticeria neighborhood. Multiple choices for flame roasted chicken are but a block away. All of them are delicious.

We’re so close to the shopping because we’re hard by the Centro. The Centro is in the flats, the valley below the mountains. So while the pattern of narrow, twisting alleys remains, walking the Centro is more like taking a stroll than staging an ascent of K2.

The Centro is full of shops, museums, theaters, and parks. The little parks are especially charming. They’re quite common, unlike the minimal green space in Oaxaca, and often feature tree canopies that have been whimsically tonsured to look like floating box hedges. That there is some Texas-sized bonsai.

Plaza De Las Ranas

Guanajuato isn’t just a place name. It’s also a word in the Purépecha language. It means hill of frogs. Apparently, there used to be a lot of frogs here. Kind of like how US subdivisions are always named for the features that were destroyed during their construction. Twin Oaks. Green Valley. Creekside.

So… no more frogs. But they’re still Guanajuato’s spirit animal, and they figure prominently around the city as iconography. No more so than at the Plaza of Frogs. The Plaza features twenty different frog sculptures, plus the enormous mosaic frog that takes up most of the plaza floor. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get a good angle on that from the ground. But we took pictures of all twenty (Gotta catch ’em all!), and share with you these greatest frog hits from Plaza de las Ranas.

It Really Is Uphill Both Ways

Guanajuato is a notably vertical city, with housing climbing up the sides of the mountains. But there’s even more to it than the height. The city also has a subterranean component, with tunnels and roadways existing on multiple levels.

Back in the mining days, the Rio Guanajuato ran through town and regularly flooded the city. Which was apparently OK with everyone until the mines started flooding, and then it was all hands on deck. As it happened, the mining companies knew a thing or two about blowing up mountains, so they blasted a series of tunnels to divert the floodwaters.

In the 1960s a new tunnel was dug out below the initial tunnels. Between that and an upstream dam, the water flow was reduced to the point that the earlier tunnels were clear, and have been used since to manage traffic instead.

In fact, they’re such an integral part of the transit landscape here that buses use them, and there are even bus stops in the tunnels themselves.

Still photos don’t do the tunnels justice, so here’s a quick walk through a short section. At the point where this video ends, it took me almost eight more minutes to walk the straight path ahead to the tunnel’s exit. These tunnels are long.

Charmed, I’m Sure…

I’m going out on a limb and claiming that, all things considered, Guanajuato out-charms Oaxaca. Oaxaca is charming because of what people are doing in it. The calendas and processions, the public performances, the way that the entire city feels like one big town square. If you neutron bombed the people out, the empty city that was left would be interesting, but it wouldn’t be charming.

Not for nothing, Guanajuato is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (as is Oaxaca, to be fair), and is charming in its own right. Even without people, you’d walk the town and be all, “Damn, this is cute.” There’s also more than a faint whiff of Antigua, Guatemala. Like Antigua, Guanajuato is chock-a-block with some serious, high-end Colonial buildings, both residential and public. While the mountainsides may have been housing for the peasants, there was serious money here, and the city shows it.

I keep comparing Oaxaca and Guanajuato, but they’re both spectacular cities, and so different. Oaxaca feels more knowable, for example. It’s laid out on a fairly rational grid, and there are zones and neighborhoods that aren’t that hard to pick up. After a couple of weeks, you can feel like you know both how and where to navigate.

Guanajuato, on the other hand, with its twisted alleys and recursive geometry, feels like it’s hiding a secret around every corner. Where Oaxaca gives itself up, Guanajuato holds itself back. Oaxaca welcomes where Guanajuato dares. OK, fine. Oaxaca is a dog and Guanajuato is a cat. Happy now?

We knew nothing about Guanajuato before this visit, but it was highly recommended by our friend Lyna when she knew we were planning most of our first year in Mexico. Many thanks, as this is fast becoming our favorite place in Mexico.