Guanajuato was for centuries the wealthiest city in Mexico, its mines pouring out silver and gold in prodigious quantities. Today it presents an astonishing sight: upon emerging from the surrounding hills you come on the town quite suddenly, a riot of colonial architecture, tumbling down hills so steep that at times it seems the roof of one building is suspended from the floor of the last. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Zone in 1988, Guanajuato is protective of its image: there are no traffic lights or neon signs here, and the topography ensures that there’s no room for new buildings. As a result, it’s another town that has drawn the attention of North American expats, arrived in the old centre. Today the city has plenty of life in its narrow streets (especially during term time), many outstanding places to eat and drink, and lots to see. There’s an old-fashioned, backwater feel to the city, reinforced by the students’ habit of going serenading in black capes, the brass bands playing in the plazas and the town’s general refusal to make any special effort to accommodate the flood of tourists who thankfully never really manage to disturb the daily ebb and flow.

There are more things to see in Guanajuato than in virtually any town of similar size: you’ll find churches, theatres, museums, battlefields, mines and mummified corpses, to name but a few of the city’s attractions. You’ll need to take the bus to get to some of these places, but most are laid out along Juárez, the town’s main thoroughfare. Below this passes an underground roadway: the Subterráneo Miguel Hidalgo. It was built as a tunnel to take the river under the city, but the river now runs deeper below ground, and its former course, with the addition of a few exits and entrances, has proved very handy in preventing traffic from clogging up the centre entirely; more tunnels have since been added to keep the traffic flowing. If you start your explorations from the Mercado Hidalgo and walk east, you’ll be able to see much of what Guanajuato has to offer in a day. Wandering through the maze of narrow alleys that snake up the side of the ravine is a pleasure in itself, if only to spot their quirky names like Salto del Mono (Monkey’s Leap) or Calle de las Cantarranas (Street of the Singing Frogs). Incidentally, references to frogs crop up everywhere around town in sculpture, artesanías and T-shirts. The valley once had so many of the amphibians that the original name of the city was Quanax-huato, meaning “Place of Frogs”.

Home to a superb host of cafés and bars, Guanajuato is the perfect town in which to sit around and knock back a coffee or a bottle or beer or two. Most of the better places are close to the Jardín de la Union and the university, while the rougher bars and clubs are down on Juárez around Mercado Hidalgo, where the cantinas are. An excellent way to pass an hour or so is to follow one of the organized callejóneadas walking tours that wind through the sidestreets and back alleys following a student minstrel group known as estudiantinas. The Ex-Hacienda de San Gabriel de Barrera (daily 9am–6pm), a colonial home now transformed into a alluring little museum. The beautifully restored gardens of the hacienda range through a bizarre selection of international styles including English, Italian, Roman, Arabic and Mexican and make a wonderful setting for the house, which has been renovated with a colonial look. Cool rooms evoke daily life among the wealthy silver barons of nineteenth-century Guanajuato and include numerous fine pieces of furniture dating back several centuries: grand and opulent on the ground floor, rich in domestic detail upstairs. It’s an enlightening place to wander at your leisure and brings home the sheer wealth of colonial Guanajuato.

Mercado Hidalgo (most stalls open daily 9am–9pm) a huge iron-framed construction of 1910 reminiscent of British Victorian train stations and crammed with every imaginable sort of goods. East of the market, to the left and through the Jardín de la Reforma, with its fountain and arch, you get to the lovely, quiet Plaza San Roque. A small, irregular, flagged space, the plaza has a distinctly medieval feel, heightened by the raised facade of the crumbling church of San Roque that towers above. It’s a perfect setting for the city’s lively annual Cervantes Festival. The Callejón de los Olleros leads back down to Juárez, or you can cut straight through to the livelier Plazuela San Fernando, with its stalls and restaurants. Return to Juárez from here and you emerge more or less opposite the Plazuela de los Angeles. In itself this is little more than a slight broadening of the street, but from here steps lead up to some of Guanajuato’s steepest, narrowest alleys. Just off the plazuela is the Callejón del Beso (20m up Callejón del Patrimonio and turn left), so called because at only a little over half a metre wide, it is slim enough for residents to lean out of the upper-storey balconies and exchange kisses across the street naturally enough there’s a Canterbury Talesstyle legend of star-crossed lovers associated with it.

The ghoulish Museo de las Momias (daily 9am–6pm), holds a very different sort of attraction. Here, lined up against the wall in a series of glass cases, are more than a hundred mummified human corpses exhumed from the local public cemetery. All the bodies were originally laid out in crypts, but if after five years the relatives were unable or unwilling to make the perpetuity payment, the remains were usually removed. Over time many were found to have been naturally preserved, and for years the cemetery became an unofficial tourist attraction. Some of the wasted, leathery bodies are more than a century old (including a smartly dressed mummy from the 1860s said to have been a French doctor). The burial clothes hang off the corpses almost indecently some are completely naked and the labels (in English) delight in pointing out their most horrendous features: one twisted mummy, its mouth opened in a silent scream, is the “woman who was buried alive”; another, a woman who died in childbirth, is displayed beside “the smallest mummy in the world”. Some of the labelling is written in the first person, adding another disturbing twist. It’s all absolutely grotesque, but not without a degree of macabre fascination. You can continue into the Salón del Culto a la Muerte, a house-ofhorrors- style extension, with an array of holographic images, jangly motorized skeletons, a rusty old chastity belt and yet more mummies. Fans of kitsch will be delighted with the hawkers outside selling mummy models and mummy-shaped shards of rock. The Plaza de la Paz lies east of the Jardín de la Reforma. The plaza boasts some of the town’s finest colonial buildings, notably the Palacio Legislativo (completed in 1900 and still in use today), and the adjacent late eighteenth-century Casa del Conde Rul y Valenciana (built by the owners of the richest mine in the country; Don Diego Rul was killed fighting rebels in 1814). The latter was designed by Eduardo Tresguerras, undoubtedly the finest Mexican architect of his time, and played host briefly to Baron Alexander von Humboldt in 1803, the German naturalist and writer, an event commemorated by a plaque. Today it serves as the regional courthouse. On the far side of the plaza stands the honey-coloured Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato (daily 8am–9pm), a Baroque parish church that was completed in 1796 and houses an ancient image of the Virgin, patroness of the city. This wooden statue, which now sits amidst silver and jewels, is said to have been given to Guanajuato in 1557 by Philip II, in gratitude for the wealth that was pouring from here into Spanish royal coffers. The Casa de Gobierno (closed to the public), a short way down towards the Jardín de la Unión, is another fine mansion, this time with a plaque recording that Benito Juárez lived here in 1858, when Guanajuato was briefly his provisional capital.

The Monumento al Pípila, a bulky statue on the hillside almost directly above the Jardín de la Unión, affords fantastic views of Guanajuato. From the viewpoint at its base you seem to be standing directly on top of the church of San Diego. It’s an especially magical spot for the 45 minutes or so during which the sun sets behind the hills and the electric lights start to come on in town. There are several possible routes up through the alleys – look for signs saying “al Pípila” including up the Callejón del Calvario, to the right off Sopeña just beyond the Teatro Juárez; from the Plazuela San Francisco; or climbing to the left from the Callejón del Beso. Pípila was Guanajuato’s own Independence hero, and at the top you’ll always find crowds of tourists trawling the food stalls here for snacks to munch while enjoying the views. If you approached Guanajuato from León, you’ll already have seen the huge statue of Cristo Rey crowning the 2661-metre Cerro de Cubilete, 20km west of the city. Variously claimed to occupy the geographical centre of the republic or just the state of Guanajuato, it seems a neat coincidence that it should be on the highest hill for miles. Nevertheless, the complex of chapels and pilgrims’ dormitories is without question magnificently sited, with long views across the plains. At its heart is a twenty-metre bronze statue erected in 1950 and ranking as the world’s second largest image of Christ, just behind Rio de Janeiro’s standing on a golden globe flanked by cherubs, one holding a crown of thorns, the other the golden crown of the “King of Kings”.

The absorbing Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Positos 47 (Tues–Sat 10am–7.30pm, Sun 10am–3pm), the home where Guanajuato’s most famous son was born in 1886. For most of his life Rivera, an ardent revolutionary sympathizer and Marxist, went unrecognized by his conservative home town, but with international recognition of his work came this museum, in the house where he was raised until he was 6. Until 1904, the Rivera family only occupied the lower floor, which is now furnished in nineteenth-century style, though only the beds and a cot actually belonged to them. The Alhóndiga de Granaditas (Tues–Sat 10am–5.45pm, Sun 10am–2.45pm), the most important of all Guanajuato’s monuments, lies west of the Museo Diego Rivera, more or less above the market. Originally a granary, later a prison and now an absorbing regional museum, this was the scene of the first real battle and some of the bloodiest butchery in the War of Independence. The museum’s exhibits, span local history from pre-Hispanic times to the Revolution: the most interesting sections cover the Independence battle and everyday life in the colonial period. One of the iron cages in which the rebels’ heads were displayed is present, as are lots of weapons and flags and a study of Guanajuato’s mining industry in the 1890s, the city’s last golden age. There’s also plenty of art, especially a wonderful series of portraits by Hermenegildo Bustos (1832–1907), the celebrated artist born near León; and don’t miss the small artesanías section by the side door, which displays a bit of everything from fabrics and clothes to saddles and metalwork.