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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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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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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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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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.