In all the guidebooks, articles and brochures, San Miguel de Allende and neighboring Guanajuato are as linked as beans and rice or tortillas and salsa.
They’re both exquisitely beautiful; they’re both rich in the history of Mexico’s war of independence against Spain; they’re both colonial cities whose wealth was connected to mining, silver mining. And they’re both not to be missed.
But they are also as different as night and day.
Especially for tourists, San Miguel has a distinctively gringo accent. The town has a large American community, ranging from retirees to students learning Spanish at one of the language schools. That means accommodations in all price ranges, restaurants catering to U.S. tastes and preferences, good shopping and an English language newspaper and English language tours.
In stark contrast, Guanajuato is Mexican, thoroughly Mexican. A state capital and university town, Guanajuato attracts plenty of visitors but relatively few Americans. So the tourism infrastructure seems relatively undeveloped.
That has its advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, even the nicest hotels and restaurants are shockingly inexpensive. But on the downside, for example, city tours, which cost 30 pesos, or roughly $5, are conducted only in Spanish. Private tour guides who speak English are available, though they charge anywhere from 175 to 220 pesos a person.
In San Miguel, it was easy to slip into the expatriate circle; sometimes we almost forgot that we were in a foreign country. In Guanajuato, we were in the thick of the rich cultural world that is Mexico.
Our arrival in San Miguel was inauspicious, to say the least. It was night; the streets were dark and unfamiliar. That’s to be expected. What wasn’t is that our hotel–the supposedly quaint, small Hacienda de las Flores–seemed totally unprepared for us. Despite our reservations, the woman at the reception desk seemed startled to receive guests. Our room was already taken or not yet ready; in either case, we were hastily shuffled off to another. The hotel restaurant, praised in the guidebooks, had ceased to exist.
We kept telling ourselves that everything would be fine in the morning. It wasn’t. We discovered that our room lacked hot water and that the hotel was empty of employees at the not-so-outrageous hour of 7 a.m. Breakfast, where we were the only people present, was a disaster. For 425 pesos a night, then roughly $70, we deserved better.
Fortunately, San Miguel abounds with hotels. Within an hour, we were comfortably ensconced in the 10-room Villa del Sol down the street, a steal at 200 pesos a night.
Finally we were ready to enjoy San Miguel.
For tourists–or visitors, as the expatriates prefer to call their countrymen–it’s very easy to get caught up in the gringo orbit. For one thing, the best way to get acquainted with the town is through the tours sponsored by expatriate groups.
On Tuesday and Friday mornings, for example, volunteers from the Patronato Pro-Ninos lead two-hour walking tours of the city center. (The 30-peso fee goes entirely to helping provide medical care for poor Mexican children.) Our tour was led by a retiree from New York, a woman who knew every shady spot in the city.
The social event of the week, though, is the Sunday house and garden tour, which benefits the bilingual library and provides scholarships for needy Mexican children. It costs about $10, and for gringos it is the place to be on Sunday morning, for it draws not only “visitors” but also a sampling of the norteamericano community.
I was unaware of the social significance of the tour until we arrived at the library at 11 a.m. to buy our tickets. Because the weather had been hot, I was wearing shorts, but a quick glance around the courtyard told me I’d made a dreadful faux pas.
All the other women were in dresses–the kind of dreamy, white or pastel, resortwear dresses that appear in Ralph Lauren ads–and oh-so-romantic straw hats. A 12-piece Mexican band played Mexican and Latin music while the crowd sipped coffee and mingled in the flower bedecked courtyard.
In addition to nonprofit tours, we encountered Las Aventuras San Miguel, owned by an American and offering a variety of tours and activities. We signed up for horseback riding ($25 for two hours), and the excursion was one of the highlights of our trip.
The stables were about 15 minutes out of town; we hired a taxi to take us out there and back. The stables are run by two Americans–Kelli Brown and her mother, Marcia Bland Brown–but their true love is the 200-year-old ex-hacienda they’re renovating.
Our ride was fantastic. To be frank, we’re tenderfoots. But we felt like cowboys riding through the untamed West. We didn’t follow some equestrian trail. No, we were riding through the countryside, with our guide Jose, who didn’t speak English.
Our first stop was Atotonilco, a dusty town with a magnificent church that attracts many Mexican pilgrims. Atotonilco is the town where the priest Miguel Hidalgo, a hero of the Mexican war of independence, took the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe as the movement’s standard.
We rode into the village like Henry Fonda, John Wayne or Gary Cooper might have moseyed into some little border town. Around the church, the campesinos were setting up stalls, most of which featured religious paintings and rosaries.
We dismounted, but I swear we didn’t wipe our brows. We entered the church, and I was almost breathless. The interior of the church is hallucinogenic. The walls are covered with murals–wild, elaborate outpourings of color, of paintings in styles ranging from baroque to folk art.
Toward the end of the ride, just when we were feeling like Clint Eastwood, our horses suddenly got spooked. They bucked and reared and reminded us that we weren’t on a Hollywood set or a tame beginner’s trail. We calmed the horses down; then we calmed down. Later, when we got Kelli to translate what Jose said, we learned that the horses had seen a rattlesnake. That brought me back to reality–and quick.
On our last day in San Miguel, we finally found ourselves enjoying the area like a Mexican. On Sunday afternoon, after the Anglo apotheosis of the house and garden tour, we decided to visit one of the spas in the area. We got a taxi to take us to Escondido Place (entry was about $3.50).
Escondido Place is alive with families eating, cooking, swimming, lazing and taking in the hot sun and the hot waters. A small boy led us from the entrance through the picnic areas and to the brick structure, with domed roofs, that houses the hot-water pools.
In the first room, we found men, women and children lying in the warm, shallow water. As we entered the next room, the water was both deeper–shoulder high–and hotter. Gradually, slowly, we made our way to the final pool, the hottest pool, where the hot springs rushed through a pipe and gushed into the waters. There the brick roof was high, rounded and open at the very top, so the steam could escape. It was pure paradise.
That evening, we sat in the main square, known as el jardin, and watched the passage of Mexican life. Hundreds of residents strolled around the square, seemingly hundreds of times. Groups of muchachos, in their tight jeans, eyed the giggling muchachas, who tended to walk in pairs. They looked, laughed and made the circle again and again. The cool breeze rippled through the trees.
Guanajuato
Guanajuato is a town of many plazas, each with its own character and habitues. Our hotel, the Posada de Santa Fe, was on the square that many consider the main plaza, El Jardin de la Union. Our hotel, like the others along the side of the park with its sculpted trees, had an outdoor cafe.
At about 4 in the afternoon every day, Mexican mariachi bands congregated outside the cafes. They wore the traditional suits, in blue or black, with the silver studs down the side seams of the trousers. And they tried to hustle songs to those sipping an afternoon coffee or an evening beer. They sang until it got dark, until the people stopped passing through the park on their way home.
For us, it was the perfect way to wind down from a day of sightseeing: buying warm, fresh bread from the huge, covered market; walking down from el pipila, the statue of a revolutionary hero that towers over the city; gaping at the splendor of the Valenciana church, built by silver mining; visiting the birth house of muralist Diego Rivera; following narrowing, winding streets and suddenly being surprised at finding a colorful square lined with pigeons.
But by far, the strangest attraction, and the one Mexicans assume Americans are most eager to see, is the cemetery, specifically its macabre mummy museum.
Somehow, sometime, someone discovered–I’m not sure I want to know the details–that Guanajuato’s soil has a peculiar chemical composition that naturally mummifies corpses. More than a hundred of these bodies are on display in a bizarre museum attached to the cemetery. At one time, these poor souls were apparently left out in the open. But too many people tried to touch them, so now they are encased behind glass.
We walked through the narrow corridors lined with bodies, our guide pointing out tumors, scars from operations or a preserved pair of socks as if he were drawing our attention to a brush stroke in a painting.
Not surprisingly, I found the experience unsettling, even grotesque. At the same time I don’t regret going–however quickly–through this museum.
It reminded me of a trip to Oaxaca almost three years earlier; we spent the night of Oct. 31 in a cemetery as Indians decorated the graves of their loved ones with candles, sand paintings and huge bouquets of burgundy cockscomb, golden marigolds and white lilies. It reminded me of Uxmal, Chichen Itza and the templo major in Mexico City; Mayans, Toltecs and Aztecs all built “skull racks,” stone walls carved with repetitive patterns of skulls and crossbones.
It reminded me of Mexico.
DETAILS ON SAN MIGUEL, GUANAJUATO
Travel in Mexico: We highly recommend the deluxe and first-class Mexican buses for comfort and ease of travel. Buses regularly depart for San Miguel and Guanajuato from the bus station of the north (Central del Norte) in Mexico City, although deluxe and first-class buses leave only a couple of times a day. For the 4-hour trip to San Miguel, we rode the deluxe ETN bus, with its big, comfy chairs, video movies and complimentary soft drinks; it cost 73 pesos, or about $12, one way. We took a first-class bus, Premiere Plus, from San Miguel to Guanajuato for 17 pesos, or $3.50.
Accommodations: San Miguel is awash in accommodations, from elegant and expensive to cheap and charming. We stayed at the 10-room Villa del Sol, about a five-minute walk from el jardin, or main square. A double room, with bath and few other amenities, cost $35 a night. In Guanajuato, we stayed at the Posada de Santa Fe, an old, slightly faded grande dame, which caters primarily to Mexican businessmen, for $47 a night on the main square, El Jardin de la Union.
More information: Call Mexico Travel Information, 800-44MEXICO.
