Things to do
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Alhóndiga de Granaditas
Built as a grain exchange and finished shortly before the insurgency began, this fortress of a building was stormed by Hidalgo forces in the first major action of the independence war. The heads of four leaders later hung in iron cages from its corners for a decade. Inside now is the state regional museum, with murals by Chávez Morado over the stairwells, and an hour covers it.
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Basílica Colegiata de Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato
A deep yellow facade trimmed in red stone faces Plaza de la Paz, the small square at the heart of the old town. Above the high altar stands Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato, a carved wooden Virgin that Philip II of Spain sent to the mining settlement in the sixteenth century. Visitors keep to the side aisles during mass, and covered shoulders are expected.
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Callejón del Beso
Balconies on opposite sides of this stepped lane almost touch, leaving a gap of a few dozen centimetres, which is enough for the legend attached to it: a daughter of a rich household, a miner, a father with a dagger, a kiss across the void. Guides gather at the red step below, where couples queue to repeat it. The alley runs off Plaza de los Ángeles.
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Castillo Santa Cecilia
Stone towers, battlements and a gatehouse give this hotel the look of a medieval castle, though it was built new in the early nineteen fifties on the land of an old hacienda. It stands on the Camino a la Valenciana above the centre, a short taxi ride from the Jardín de la Unión. The towers are easiest to see from the road on the way up to the Valenciana mine.
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Diego Rivera House Museum
Rivera was born in this house on Calle Positos in 1886, and the family left Guanajuato while he was still small. The ground floor is furnished as a nineteenth-century household; above it hang early drawings, lithographs and studies, among them work towards the Rockefeller Center mural that was destroyed in New York. Upper galleries change through the year. The rooms are modest and quiet, and an hour is plenty.
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Mercado Hidalgo
An iron and glass hall with a clock tower over its main door, the market was opened by Porfirio Díaz in 1910 on the site of a former bullring. The ground floor sells produce, meat, cheese and lunch at counter fondas; the gallery running round the upper level is given over to leather, sweets and souvenirs. It stands on Avenida Juárez, a few minutes on foot west of the Jardín de la Unión.
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Monumento al Pípila
Take the funicular from behind Teatro Juárez, or climb the stepped lanes, to reach the pink stone miner standing above the city with a torch raised. He is Juan José de los Reyes Martínez, credited with burning the granary door under a slab of rock strapped to his back. The terrace below the plinth gives the full view of domes and painted houses, and it fills at sunset.
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Museo de las Momias
Bodies disinterred from the Santa Paula cemetery when a burial tax went unpaid dried in the mineral soil and kept their faces, and more than a hundred of them now stand in lit cases: a drowned man, a woman buried during a cholera epidemic, infants dressed as saints. The museum sits above the city, a stiff climb or a short taxi ride from the centre, and small children find it hard going.
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Museo Iconográfico del Quijote
Eulalio Ferrer, a Spanish businessman exiled in Mexico, gave the state his collection of Don Quixote imagery, and it fills the rooms of a colonial house on Manuel Doblado. Paintings, sculpture, ceramics and prints show the knight and Sancho Panza through the eyes of Dalí, Pedro Coronel and many Mexican artists. Entry is ticketed, the museum closes on Mondays, and it hosts events during the Cervantino each October.
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Teatro Juárez
Bronze muses stand along the cornice of a Doric portico, and behind it the auditorium turns Moorish: horseshoe arches, carved wood, gilt and red velvet under a painted ceiling. Inaugurated in 1903 with Porfirio Díaz in the audience, the theatre is still the main stage of the Cervantino festival each October. Daytime tours run between rehearsals, and the steps outside face the Jardín de la Unión.
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Templo de la Compañía de Jesús
Pink stone carved in the Churrigueresque manner covers the front of this Jesuit church, which stands beside the main building of the University of Guanajuato. The broad neoclassical dome over the crossing is a later replacement, and it floods the high, pale nave with light. The church is a short climb up from Plaza de la Paz and stays open between services.
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Templo de San Cayetano de La Valenciana
Six kilometres up the road to Dolores Hidalgo, the owner of the Valenciana silver mine paid for this church of pink stone in the late eighteenth century, and its three gilded altarpieces show where the money went. The mine is across the road, and guided visits go a short way down one of its old shafts. City buses marked Valenciana climb from the centre; a taxi takes about fifteen minutes.
