My first tour took me to the hills of Guanajuato. We stopped at the church of San Cayetano, next to the old mines at La Valenciana. From here you get an aerial view of the city. My group stopped at an art museum, and another smaller mine before we went to the statue of Pipila, which offers the best view of the city. Our final stop was the Museo de los Momios (Museum of the Mummies), a collection of about 100 mummies that were exhumed when the city expanded its cemetery. They are in fact not mummies, which are deliberately preserved. There are many theories as to how these corpses are preserved (the type of water in the ground in Guanajuato, for example) but nobody is certain.
Teatro Juarez.
The tunnels underneath Guanajuato. Originally the city was built at the same level as the tunnels, but the annual rising of the rivers forced the Spainards to build the city on a higher level.
Casa de Diego Rivera, Mexico's most famous muralist.
Guanajuato is situated in a valley among hills. Many of the homes are built on the hills. The colors of the homes are spectacular.
In Guanajuato people live on alleys (callejones), not streets. When you open the front door, the house across the street is only ten feet away.
El Callejon del Beso (the alley of the kiss). According to the love story, two secret lovers exchanged kisses from opposing balconies.
Guanajuato at 7:00 AM on New Year's Day. It was dead silent.
El Museo de las Momias (the museum of the mummies). As my guide said, the name is a misnomber. A mummy is preserved on purpose, but these disinterred "mummies" are naturally preserved. Nobody knows how.
An aerial view of Guanajuato from the Pipila Monument. The yellow building in the middle of the picture is La Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guanajuato, Behind it is El Temploy de la Compania
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