A Town With No Straight Line in It
The town sits at about two thousand metres above the sea, pressed between dry ridges. With no level ground to lay a grid on, the built fabric climbs the rocky slopes in uneven tiers, and right angles between outer walls are scarce. Streets twist along the fissures of the ravine, narrowing unpredictably before resolving into stone steps. A great many of these lanes are called callejones — the Spanish word means simply a narrow alley — and here a large share of them are staircases.
For anyone walking, the map is a poor guide. Seen from above, two lanes appear to meet where in fact one passes far below the other, and a junction on paper turns out to be a wall. You navigate by slope rather than by plan: routes ascend toward the rim or descend toward the valley floor. Doorsteps open straight onto treads worn smooth by foot traffic, and a household window can face the paving of the passage above it. Where the steps begin, wheels stop, and deliveries come the rest of the way by hand.
The River That Became a Road
Beneath the pedestrian lanes runs the town’s strangest inheritance. Popular travel lore claims these underground streets began as silver-mine adits. They did not. They began as flood works, built to manage the Río Guanajuato, the Guanajuato River, which repeatedly inundated the settlement. Torrents funnelled down the ravine, carrying mud through dwellings and swamping the commercial centre.
The answer was to build over the water. Engineers arched the river with stone vaults, and in time shut it into a covered conduit with a street laid along the top. Later tunnels were driven through the rock for traffic alone, so what exists underneath is part river, part road. Buses, delivery vans and cars pass through vaulted stone passages beneath living rooms and public squares.
The consequence above ground is acoustic. Traffic drops out of hearing on entering the valley and surfaces again at sunken junctions, where a stairway climbs from the lower road to the square above. On the lanes and stepped alleys the loudest thing is usually a conversation, and long stretches of the centre are given over to walking — not because anyone pedestrianised them, but because the road went underneath. The avenues on the valley floor still carry cars, and sound like it.
Colour, and What It Is Painted On
Seen from the ridges above, Guanajuato resembles a dense tumble of coloured masonry cubes poured down the rock face. Domestic walls are finished in lime plaster and coated in flat mineral pigments—ochre, terracotta, dusky rose, deep rust and cobalt blue. Because dwellings stack against the incline, the flat parapet of a house often aligns with the front sill of an uphill neighbour, creating a mosaic of contrasting tints across the valley wall.
Among the painted houses stand buildings of another order. Facing the central square is the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guanajuato, painted deep yellow with red picked out along its trim, its tower standing clear of the roofs behind it. The church commands the Plaza de la Paz, the Square of Peace, where the ravine floor widens into a paved triangle between the slopes.
Nearby, Teatro Juárez, the Juárez Theatre, carries a row of classical stone columns and a line of cast bronze figures along its roofline, with an interior worked in Moorish style behind that very European front. It went up across the turn of the twentieth century. Uphill from it rises the Universidad de Guanajuato, the University of Guanajuato, faced in the local cantera — a volcanic stone the building wears in green and violet — above a wide, steep flight of exterior steps where students gather between lectures.
Further along the ravine floor, Mercado Hidalgo, the Hidalgo Market, encloses the town’s trade within a framework of iron and glass. Riveted columns carry a long vaulted roof, and the light falls through the glazing onto the stalls beneath. It is a piece of industrial engineering set down among stone churches, all span and no thickness.
Among the residential passages, the Callejón del Beso, the Alley of the Kiss, narrows until the balconies on opposite sides come close to meeting over the stone lane. The gap is small enough to lean across, and the custom attached to the place is a kiss on the step below.
Higher on the hillside, an ordinary town house marks the birthplace of the painter Diego Rivera, and is kept as a museum.
The Student City, at Night
Guanajuato is a university town and sounds like one after dark. The evening belongs to the callejoneada, a musical walk through the alleys led by performers in velvet doublets. The troupes are called estudiantinas — the name and the tradition come from the university, though the players today are not all students — and they go through the steep stone passages in doublets, dark hose and trailing cloaks, carrying stringed instruments.
A singing assembly follows the minstrels uphill, trailing through narrow bends where stone walls amplify the acoustics of plucked strings and choral verses. The procession pauses at tight corners for spoken interludes before continuing through the maze of staircases. Wooden instruments rebounding from stone give these walks a sharp sonic texture in the cool mountain air.
Out of that street habit grew something larger. Each October the city hosts the Festival Internacional Cervantino, the International Cervantino Festival, which began with university students staging works by Cervantes in the public squares. It spreads into courtyards, open-air theatres and halls across the town, and for as long as it runs the ravine is full of visiting musicians and actors.
The Table
The local plate is enchiladas mineras, meaning miners’ enchiladas, and the name is the town’s own. Corn tortillas—thin griddled maize flatbreads—are dipped in a crimson sauce made from the dried guajillo chilli, folded around fresh crumbling cheese, and served with fried potato and carrot cut small alongside. It is filling food from a place where the work was heavy.
Afterwards there is cajeta, a thick, glossy caramel made from goat’s milk and associated with Celaya, in the same state. Long slow cooking with sugar gives it a toasted, faintly musky depth, and it is eaten by the spoonful or spread over bread.
The table follows the year. The wet season runs from late spring into October, heaviest at the end of summer, and the rain tends to arrive in the afternoon and break into a clear dusk. The winter months are the dry ones: mild under strong sunlight, and cold enough after dark to send diners indoors and make hot food the obvious choice.
Why the Ravine Is Inhabited at All
Nobody would have farmed here. What brought people into the gorge was rock: rich outcrops of silver-bearing stone, and then the shafts that followed them down. The town grew wealthy on a whole group of mines, Valenciana chief among them, and the money went into the ornate stone churches, the university and the theatrical halls standing along the ravine floor.
The shape of the city—covered channels, stepped alleys, houses gripping the slope—is what that mineral rush left behind. In recognition of this architectural and engineering heritage, the historic town and its adjacent mines were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1988. What is unusual is that none of it became a monument: the town built to dig silver out of these hills is still lived in, and still runs the state.
Getting here is a subject of its own, and it begins a long way down on the plain: see our companion piece on the regional flights serving the central highlands.
