Guanajuato - A Revelation
Trip Start
Dec 27, 2008
1
143
195
Trip End
Ongoing
Guanajuato, Central Mexico and Gulf Coast, Mexico
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
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Questions - Comments: travelswithlobo@yahoo.co
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Guanajato
No. 3 of 23 (this is not a ranking)
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Location: three and a half hours north-west of Mexico City
Altitude: 2,000 meters (6,562 ft)
Population: 71,000
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Guanajuato - A Revelation
(Part 1 of 3)
After San Miguel de Allende we doubted that we would find another destination that would be as beautiful
- city and state have the same name
.That doubt was well placed as the taxi driver took us from the bus station to the El Minero Hotel located at Alhóndiga 12 A. The name of the hotel - The Miner - recalls the history of silver mining in this area. The natural instinct is to wonder - how beautiful can a former mining town be?
As one looks at the rugged topography into which this city is built, it begs the question, why build a city here in such a mountainous place? The answer again comes from the historical fact that silver mining was the main industry here. That is an understatement as in the 18th century two thirds of the world's silver production took place here.
As we left the El Minero Hotel we wondered what we would find. After all, San Miguel de Allende is a hard act to follow.
Due to the rugged terrain, the route into the downtown along 5 de Mayo led through a steep rock cut and a short tunnel. This would bring us to Av. Juarez, the main street.
Av
- El Minero - our hotel
. de Juarez, a commercial street, is quite wide at this point full of the usual activities that one finds in Mexican streets. This short stretch of Av. de Juarez is probably the only wide street in this city as flat real estate is at a premium due to the terrain.So how does traffic get through this city in an environment that is not conducive to building roads? Well at some point some Italian engineers must have come here to build an incredible network of underground tunnels and parking lots that form a labyrinth of roads under the downtown area. I say Italian because from my travels in Italy I came to the conclusion that the Italians never saw a hill or mountain that they could not conquer with a tunnel.
It would be safe to say that there is no other city in Mexico with such an extensive underground network of roads that leads traffic unobstructed through the downtown.
The best way to see this city is as a pedestrian as the encroaching hills and far off mountains give a feeling of intimacy to the downtown.
As we walked west along Av
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. Juarez our attention was drawn to a massive building that reminded me of the old Cow Palace at Lansdowne Park in Ottawa. Ornate and grandiose at the same time, it turned out to be the huge "Mercado Hidalgo" or market.That's all we needed to hear to send us in that direction in search of our "standard" lunch in Mexico. That standard lunch turned out to be freshly cut fruits consisting of various combinations of pineapple, papaya, mangos, bananas, cantaloupe, water melon or honey dew which are sold ready to eat in plastic containers from as little as 10 pesos ($1 Can.) It must have been good because only this evening (February 18, 2009) I heard Barbara say- "I miss the fresh fruit we had in Mexico".
As we continued our explorations we were getting deeper into the Centro Historico.
Not that we knew this in advance since I have often written in my blogs that advance research is not my forte. When it comes to our travels. I like to take full advantage of the "discovery method".
Once Av. Juarez became Plaza de la Paz the view was worthy of a double take
- the circus is in town
. On the left was the beautiful "Palacio Legislativo" right out of old Spain and straight ahead the stunning view of a majestic church, the "Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guanajuato". The vistas were profound and we just looked at each other in awe asking ourselves - are we really here and seeing this beautiful sight. That is the beauty of travel - to be impacted by beautiful surroundings.Then there was the street urchin playing the mournful sound of his accordion, a sight that was a constant to our several passages past this point on Plaza de la Paz. Each time there was Barbara tugging at my heart strings with "give him something, give him something, does he not have a home?" No, he probably does not have a home but in Mexico people find a way to survive and in fact there are few people who are outright begging.
So far so good, we were starting to forget a little bit about San Miguel de Allende. SMA is cute, beautiful but there are few views that one would describe as majestic and sweeping except perhaps the view from the top of the mountain towards downtown. (more about that in the next blog).
At this point we were just beginning to enter the heart of the "Centro Historico"
- heading out of see the town
. If it hasn't yet been made clear in my blogs, the "centro historicos" are the jewels of these beautiful colonial cities that lie on the Central Highlands of Mexico, north-west of Mexico City. Some of these jewels of course are prettier than others and we would soon find out that Guanajuato is one of the prettiest contributions that the Spaniards made to New Spain. Of course that fabulous silver mine at near-by Valenciana had a lot to do with this turn of events. From this point we continued to the focal point of the "centro historico" - that being the main plaza called "Jardin de Unión". The more time we spent here to savour the beauty of this triangular park and the nearby Teatro Juárez and Templo de San Diego the more I became convinced this spot needed a separate blog (Guanajuato - Jardin de Unión - In the Name of "Travels With Lobo" I declare ----" Part 3 of 3).
Being of German background I have to note the frequent references that I have come across to Alexander von Humboldt (1768 -1859), the German naturalist and explorer. I have seen reference to him in my trips to South America as well as in Victoria, BC where a downtown street bears his name. Here in the "centro historico" of Guanajuato there is a "Pasaje Von Humboldt" as well.
His is actually quite an incredible story
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. For one thing when you read about his travels it would have been a challenge in modern times but this was in the early 1800's.http://geography.about.com/od/historyofgeography/a/vonhumboldt.htm
Just as surprising was a plaque on a house declaring that it was the location of the Prussian Consulate. Now that is amazing in that Prussia predated Germany which was established in 1871. It begs the question why would Prussia in the early 1800's have a consulate in Guanajuato? It just occurs to me that the answer probably lies somewhere in the word "silver". There is nothing like gold or silver to get the attention of interested parties. Another thought is that it might have had something to do with the presence of Von Humboldt in the city; he after all was Prussian and not German.
.... Now to get around to something more practical...
If you have read a number of my blogs you may know that the afternoon coffee (around 17:00) is an important part of our lives or at least my life as Barbara is not as hooked as I am
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. I still dream of that cup of coffee and chocolate cake that I had in a sidewalk café in Mendoza, Argentina in 2006. The apparent lack of coffee shops was a disappointment in Guanajuato.
How is that possible in a country that has two of the world's great coffee regions - Oaxaca and Chiapas? Or could it be that gourmet coffee is not that important to the average Mexican? What one encounters generally in Mexico is the "café de olla". This is coffee made in a big pot to which is added cinnamon, aniseeds and "pilincillo", a brown sugar, which results in the strangest flavour - for most "North American" and European taste buds.
Bottom line, when it comes to just plain coffee you have to ask for a "café americano". That would be a coffee made from a coffee machine. Our search in Guanajuato finally led us to the Italian Coffee Company. That turned me off immediately. Why do they have to call it the "Italian Coffee Company" in a country which has some of the world's best coffee? I know that Italians consume more coffee than any other people on earth so they should know a thing or two about coffee, but the Italian Coffee Company in Mexico? Anyway to get back to the bottom line, the Italian Coffee Company serves disappointing coffee, at least in my opinion. Unfortunately the Italian Coffee Company, based in Puebla, is found all over Mexico. So my aim everywhere else was to find an alternative to the Italian Coffee Company that would be a locally owned Mexican coffee shop that serves a good cup of "café americano". They are not as common as one would think as I said earlier. Ultimately we often settled for a $1 café americano from Oxxo - a chain of modern convenience stores that can be found in most parts of Mexico
- intense colours
. That is my coffee story and I am sticking to it.
While on the subject of food..... Here in Guanajuato we discovered crusty buns being sold by street vendors that rivaled those we liked eating for breakfast in Europe. As a result in our travels through Mexico we were always on the lookout for the crusty buns with varying degree of success. Choosing between two places may in the end come down to which has the better crusty buns.
No visit to Guanajuato would be complete without looking up the birthplace (1886) of its most famous son. That honour goes to non-other than Diego Rivera who is considered to be the greatest Mexican painter of the 20th century. His story will forever be linked with great public murals, his allegiance to Marxism and his relationship with another icon of Mexican art - Frieda Kalho. His is a complicated story.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/diego-rivera/about-the-artist/64/
In 2001 I had heard of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kalho for the first time when I took a Spanish course at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) Escuela de Extension en Canada, located in Gatineau, Quebec just across the Ottawa River from Ottawa, Ontario where I then lived
- that's a menu for $3 Can.
. The story was fascinating at the time so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Guanajuato was his hometown and that there was a museum dedicated to him here.I am generally adverse to museum visits as I am not a "details man" which is why I did not participate in the walking tour that Barbara took in San Miguel de Allende. To me there is nothing worse than a tour guide who spends five minutes explaining the nuances on the face of the third gargoyle from the left on a cathedral wall. Be that as it may, here at the Diego Rivera Museum I was able to slip by the guided tour to do my own quick tour. Barbara of course took her own slower version that left me enjoying the scenery outside the Diego Rivera Museum for half an hour.
Every time that we take a trip it seems that new words or phrases are coined to describe either positive or negative situations. My blogs of Mexico, if you haven't noticed, tend to be on the positive side. That is because we genuinely were enthusiastic about most of what we saw but there is nevertheless a lot in Mexico for which I inadvertently used the word "yikes!!". For those of you who are not native English speakers "yikes" is a word that expresses fear or negative astonishment or that is used when being suddenly startled.
The so-called "Yikes Factor" was definitely alive and well in Mexico and is deserving of a blog before I finish this series.
On that scale Guanajuato was low on the "Yikes Factor" and High of the "Wow Factor".
After having spent two days in Guanajuato, any doubts that we may have had that it would not live up to the expectations of San Miguel de Allende had vanished. In our next blog they not only vanished but we started to think that this was an even better place than SMA. Like SMA it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
http://www.mexconnect.com/MEX/mxc/gto.html
Coming Soon: Guanajuato - El Pilar - A Magic Moment - Part 2 of 3
