Introduction

In colonial times, Guanajuato was Mexico’s second wealthiest city after the capital, despite its small size, while its Valenciana mine, situated in the hills to the west, was allegedly the deepest silver mine in the world. In the 18th century the mine alone accounted for 60 percent of the world’s total silver production, and for three whole centuries, Guanajuato flourished as the silver mining capital of the world, producing nearly a third of the world’s silver.

Guanajuato was developed rapidly by the Spanish, so fast in fact that the palatial train station was constructed in all of its splendor before engineers had realized the impossibility of routing a train into the city lying in the narrow cleft of surrounding mountains. What was to be the station is now the Mercado Juarez, the town’s colorful central source of supplies, also selling handicrafts.

In 1905 the city was flooded. Signs on some of the central streets mark the levels the waters rose to. The river was subsequently diverted and tunnels tracing the path of the former riverbeds now serve as the major traffic thoroughfares, making for a labyrinthine network of underground roads and leaving many of the streets exclusively pedestrian.

The cradle of Mexico’s independence movement, it is here, in the then newly completed Alhondiga de Granaditas, a former grain warehouse and later a prison, where Spanish authority was assaulted in the first battle for independence. On September 28, 1810, an obscure miner, Juan Jose de los Reyes Martinez, otherwise known as El Pipila, set the main entrance on fire, allowing insurgents to charge the building and attack the Spaniards. On the hill above the city, that spark that set off the war of independence is commemorated by a massive monument of the young boy bearing his flaming torch. An eternal call to arms is inscribed on the plinth of the monument: “There are still other alhondigas to burn.”