A Mexico Hill Town to Savor : The winding streets of lively Guanajuato brim with color, culture and friendly folks

It’s a cool, starry night 200 miles northwest of Mexico City, and I’m standing on a rooftop with 11-year-old Rafael Albundoz-Ramirez and his family. Across the narrow, densely built canyon that cradles downtown Guanajuato, a thousand modest homes climb the hillside in dimly lit hues of orange, yellow, green and blue. Beneath us, 2,000 giddy locals are packed into an

outdoor amphitheater, waiting, as we are, for a free ballet folklorico performance to start.

Up in the hills behind us are the mines that began producing astounding volumes of silver in the 16th Century, putting Guanajuato on Mexico’s colonial map. To our left, the amphitheater seating

leads back to the tall walls of the Alhondiga de Granaditas. From that building, which was built as a grain warehouse, Spanish colonial authorities in 1811 hung the severed heads of four rebels to discourage those who fought for Mexican independence. In another decade,

the Spanish were chased out for good, and Guanajuato had an honored role in the quest for Mexican self-determination.

Now, suddenly, the crowd roars. A line of dancers advances across the stage, kicking and spinning, garbed in colors that surpass those of the houses on the hill. Young Rafael bombards me with questions about the climate of Los Angeles, the whereabouts of Michael Jackson’s home, the hotel we’re staying in and on and on. But when I turn the tables on him and ask about the music and dances, he is taken aback.

“You don’t know these songs?” Rafael asks me in Spanish. How, he wonders, could his city’s history and culture be so underappreciated outside Mexico?

After three days in Guanajuato, I can’t blame him for wondering.

Other visitors have described Guanajuato as a Tuscan village on steeper, drier slopes, or as a Greek island town with a wider color spectrum. I would add that it’s a vertical city, like San Francisco, and as friendly as any American small town I’ve visited.

The population of the city is about 78,000, including about 15,000 students at the University of Guanajuato. The altitude is 6,000-feet-plus above sea level, and almost everything is within walking distance. There is no beach, no lake, no golf, and I don’t think I saw a tennis court.

Silver mining built Guanajuato, just as it built Zacatecas 200 miles to the north. (Taxco, Mexico’s oldest and perhaps most famous silver town, lies 300 miles southwest of Mexico City.) As in much of small-town Mexico, Guanajuato’s older population is very Catholic and very traditional. The Holy Week concluding with Easter Sunday brings major crowds from surrounding cities, and on any day, in early morning light, the climbing and swooping cobblestone alleys of Guanajuato look quaint and sleepy.

But do not be deceived. This is a Mexican town with a double espresso under its belt and a dogeared copy of “Don Quixote” in hand. The students are ubiquitous. The university is known for its arts programs. The renowned muralist Diego Rivera is celebrated here in a museum that was once his childhood home. And every October, the city blooms into one of Latin America’s leading cultural showcases.

Though the great 16th-Century Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes never set foot in Guanajuato (or anywhere else in Mexico, for that matter), a group of students led by university faculty member Enrique Ruelas Espinoza started presenting entremeses --skits--from his work in the city’s Plazuela San Roque in 1953. Just as Ashland, Ore., has parlayed its Shakespeare festival into a nearly year-round series of plays, performances and exhibits (despite having no particular connections to that 16th-Century author), Guanajuato has built its Festival Internacional Cervantino into a three-week event that fills the city’s hotels with students and affluent arts lovers from all over Mexico. The artists and performers who take part don’t necessarily have any more to do with Cervantes than does the city itself; this year, for instance, they ranged from stars of the Kiev Opera Ballet to Olivia Olea--a Los Angeles filmmaker who brought “Por La Vida,” her documentary on Los Angeles street vendors. *

Guanajuato is well-equipped for tourists. A government tourism study two years ago found 1,791 guest rooms in the city in 40 hotels, several of them--including the Real de Minas, the Parador San Javier and the Castillo Santa Cecilia--converted from haciendas of the mining barons into lodgings. The same survey estimated that of 4.1 million visitors to Guanajuato in 1991, just 280,000 came from outside Mexico.

“This is the most beautiful city in Mexico,” says a gregarious young man named Octavio Nunez, who comes from nearby Celaya. We’re sitting on the steps of the university, looking out at the rooftops of town. “The architecture and the patrimony of the humanities are here, and part of our history begins here,” says Nunez.

Yet of those 280,000 or so non-Mexicans who visit the city each year, many have probably just come for the dead.

Out on the west edge of town, the state government displays under glass 100-plus corpses, all apparently preserved by rare minerals in the local soil, and this is all many Americans have ever heard of Guanajuato.

“ Las Momias !” small boys are likely to shout at you as you enter town for the first, second and third times. The shouting kids want to be tour guides, but they’re not necessary. If you must go, drive or take a cab or bus to the mummy museum and hand over about $1.70 for a ticket (more if you have a camera). Then you are admitted to a series of rooms filled with dead of all shapes and sizes, down to the 8-inch-high figure billed as the smallest mummy in the world. The mummies are said to be evidence of the Mexicans’ particular fascination with death.

Guanajuato’s main street is Avenida Juarez, but one of the city’s distinguishing features is the number of cars at any moment that are passing under town, instead of through it. After a flood in 1905, Mexican engineers rerouted the river that cut through the city into an underground tunnel. Above the river, in a tunnel of its own, much of the local traffic now flows, branching out into a perplexing network of subsidiary tunnels that surface here and there amid the monuments of downtown. Whenever there’s a choice, travel by foot.

Two of the most striking structures on Avenida Juarez are the Mercado Hidalgoand, a few blocks to the east, the Teatro Juarez. The Mercado Hidalgo, a massive, hangar-like marketplace with skylights, a rounded metal roof above and an inscription that dates it to 1910, hums on two levels. Upstairs, along a walkway around the market’s periphery, souvenir vendors and tourists take in the interior panorama below. Downstairs, local families browse for produce, meat and sweets. The stacks of onions, carrots and tomatoes make the place seem ageless, but beneath the counter of more than one produce stand, tiny televisions discreetly flicker with the action of a soccer game.

From outside, the Teatro Juarez looms with tall columns, long rows of stone steps and gesticulating statuary along its roof line. But the building is even more astounding inside, as I saw the night we filed in to claim our $12 seats for the Cervantino offering of Mozart’s opera “La Clemenza di Tito.” Ornate as an overstuffed jewel box, the theater includes four levels of seating (with private boxes), dazzling patterns in gold and red on its ceiling and walls and, amid all that busy opulence, a simple iron star-shaped chandelier. The picture was completed when the curtain came up and revealed two singers arranged amid the scenery like an 18th-Century painting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a gorgeous theater interior.

The Jardin Union, across the street from the Teatro Juarez, is where the young and old of Guanajuato come to promenade, people-watch, listen to the military band that plays three evenings a week, gaze from a green park bench up at the 18th-Century Church of San Diego or get a shoeshine. (Or, if you’re a high-spirited student on a weekend night, to slug down tequila-and-Squirt cocktails with a dozen friends at the sidewalk tables of Bar Luna or El Gallo Pitagorico next door.) The Jardin Union also stands as geometric proof of how Guanajuato’s perch between hills forced the city’s builders into flexibility: The Jardin Union, which functions as Guanajuato’s central square, is a triangle.

*

By the way, in guidebooks and state tourism literature, the most-cited example of Guanajuato’s strange shape is the Callejon del Beso, an ancient alley near the theater that narrows to about 27 inches--close enough, so the story goes, for neighbors to lean forward and kiss over the traffic. Unfortunately, that short callejon is now marred by graffiti, flanked by cheesy souvenir stands and frequented principally by tourists. In a town full of charming narrow alleys, the Callejon del Beso may be the narrowest, but it is also probably the least charming.

For a better measure of Guanajuato, drive along the Carretera Panoramica, the high route around town that clings to the hillsides, and pull over to scan the panorama from beneath the monument to Pipila, an Indian miner who sacrificed his life in an 1810 independence movement battle against the Spanish at the Alhondiga de Granaditas. Then dip back into the city, lose yourself in any residential neighborhood and savor the odd twists, turns, climbs and descents it takes to find your way out.

“There are such beautiful corners and alleys in this town, but most of the tourists don’t see them,” says Hector de la Torre, who has lived in Guanajuato for 35 of his 53 years. “They go from one tourist site to the next with their eyes closed. Then they open them and say, ‘Ah, Teatro Juarez. Next?’ ”

For instance: Once you’ve made the necessary visit to the Diego Rivera House and Museum (which is stronger on sketches, studies and historical data than it is on full-fledged paintings, but still worthwhile), keep your eyes open as you walk west on Positos, paralleling Juarez but avoiding the heaviest traffic and approaching the Alhondiga de Granaditas. Each house on the right is tile-roofed and two stories high. The first has walls of aquamarine, 21 symmetrically arranged bright yellow flowerpots on its upstairs balcony and a kindly lady resident who says she has lived there for more than 30 years. The next house is beige with white window frames. The third is kelly green with black grillwork. The fourth is gray-blue with brown-orange earthen pots and black door frames. And the fifth has walls of blood red with three white double doors up on the balcony. Every once in a while, a delivery boy rushes past this rainbow coalition, a basket full of hot, fresh bread balanced on his head.

Continuing west for a few blocks on Positos, a walker passes sleeping dogs, Indians peddling produce, and an ocher-hued two-story residence advertising an opening for a student lodger. Eventually, you reach the Alhondiga de Granaditas, the pivotal building in Guanajuato’s history. From grain warehouse, armory and scene of slaughter, it was later transformed into a jail for a century, then converted into a museum in the 1960s. Its interior walls crawl with dramatic mural work, and its exhibition rooms are full of ancient pottery, historic photos, regional art and a memorial to the leaders of the Mexican independence movement.

*

It’s late afternoon now, and we’re rumbling up the hillside on the northwest end of town. At the massive Church of La Valenciana, we veer left and follow a winding cobblestone road that twists, turns and eventually empties into a broad, flat parking area flanked by souvenir and jewelry stalls.

Beyond the stalls stands La Valenciana mine, once the wealthiest in the city, said to have yielded 20% or more of the world’s silver production by itself for several centuries. An estimated 460 million tons of silver has been extracted from this mine and others like it over the past 400 years, and it’s still in operation. Hopping about on a clanking, whining platform, about 150 men labor in three shifts under cooperative ownership. Guide Ignacio Garcia reports that they bring up 300 tons of rock daily, on the average extracting 200 grams of silver and two grams of gold from each ton. The main yard, with its smokestack, pyramid structures and drilling platform, is open free to visitors during the day.

Garcia, a genial, silver-haired, leather-skinned man who says he has spent more than 30 years at the mine, shows us samples of amethyst, dolomite and iron oxide, gives us the historic overview, then twists a key in a rusty old lock. We step up to the lip of the vertical mine shaft, and stare into infinity, more or less.

The opening of the shaft is round--about 35 feet in diameter--and it closes my circle on Guanajuato. A hundred feet down into the 2,000-foot vertical shaft, the view darkens into profound blackness. I look down, then amble over to a viewpoint a few yards away, from which the rooftops, the church spires, the winding alleyways and the laughing students of Guanajuato, all crowd between the rugged slopes. All this, sprung from a hole in the ground.

GUIDEBOOK

Going to Guanajuato

Getting there: Aeromexico offers nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Bajio Airport, which serves Leon and Guanajuato (each about half an hour away). Restricted round-trip fares begin at $352.95. Both Aeromexico (via Puerto Vallarta) and Mexicana (via Zacatecas) offer direct flights as well, with the lowest restricted Aeromexico fare also $352.95.

Where to stay: Real de Minas (Nejayote No. 17; from U.S. telephones 011-52-473-214-60), where I stayed, is a 175-room hillside place about 10 minutes’ walk (or a $2 taxi ride) from town. Responsive service, swimming pool, aggravating phone system. Double rooms: $93-$116. The sprawling Parador San Javier (Plaza San Javier; tel. 011-52-473-206-26) includes 115 rooms about 20 minutes’ walk from the center of town. Excellent service, handsome dining room, not-quite-clean pool. Double rooms: $83-$95. Castillo Santa Cecilia (Camino de la Valenciana; tel. 800- 223-6510 or 011-52-473-204-85) has 88 rooms in a striking former castle. Pool. About 20 minutes’ walk from center of town. Service and upkeep fall a bit short of the Parador San Javier. Double rooms: $86.

Hotel Museo Posada Santa Fe (Jardin Union No. 12; tel. 011-52-473-200-84) located right on Guanajuato’s principal square, with sidewalk dining out front. In business since 1862. A score of bird cages hanging in second-floor courtyard; good restaurant. Roomy suites.Double rooms: $89. Hotel San Diego (Jardin Union No. 1; tel. 011-52-473-256-26) sits on a prime corner and is filled with wonderful old tile work. A bit more bedraggled than the others listed here. Double rooms: $66. A good selection of budget accommodations is also available in Guanajuato; cheapest are about $15 per night.

Where to eat: El Agora del Baratillo (Baratillo and Hidalgo streets; local tel. 233-00). Courtyard setting, a block away from the strollers of the Jardin Union. Typical Mexican cuisine. Main courses: $3-$10. Real de la Esperanza (Carretera a Dolores Hidalgo, Km5; tel. 210-41) is a domed, two-year-old, high-end restaurant that overlooks the city from a hilltop near the La Valenciana mine and is easily mistaken for a church. Expensive modern art on the walls. Mexican cuisine, with emphasis on beef and seafood. Main courses: $8-$11. El Pinguis (Jardin Union and Allende No. 1; tel. 214-14) is an unassuming, inexpensive spot for breakfast or lunch. Favored by students. Breakfasts under $4.

For more information: Mexican Government Tourism Office (10100 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 224, Los Angeles 90067; tel. 310- 203-8191) or International Cervantes Festival (Alvaro Obregon 273, Colonia Roma, Mexico, D.F., Mexico; tel. 011-52-551-473-65).