Guanajuato Mummies, Yes They Are Real & They Are Waiting To Meet You. Address: The City’s Cemetery.
“Las Momias de Guanajuato” have become one of the main attractions of this charming, and full of burrows, Mexican city.
Once you arrive in the city of Guanajuato you will find yourself in a strange place… and you haven’t met the mummies yet. From the first tunnel you enter riding the particular transport you may have chosen, being the bus the cheapest but obviously the crowded option, you will see from the window that the curvy road is taking you to the bottom of a long shallow canyon, known by locals as “la cañada”. Once inside, you’ll notice you are surrounded by hills and stony walls that have been covered by a bunch of windows, doors, balconies; all belonging to swarms of houses, some in live colors, others dull; and all separated by narrow alleys that will take you from the top of the canyon to the bottom. An agglomerate of colors and combination of shapes that for many will look strange and charming at the same time.
In practical terms, there exists only one barely straight street in the city, its circulation sense runs from east to west. It changes names along its more than five kilometers in length, but the main part crossing downtown Guanajuato is known as “Avenida Juárez”. It’s the main commercial and touristic zone of the city full of shops and restaurants of all sizes. As you continue your ride, or walk, you will arrive to the most western extreme of the road where you will find the old Train Station, a place that saw better days in the early xxth century and that now is just testimony of a time when passenger trains still existed in Mexico. Though the park surrounding the old buildings is kind of charming.
By the way, if you were curious enough, by now you should have noticed that underneath Juarez Ave. there exists an underground street running west to east. Now that you are an official tourist in Guanajuato, be prepared to walk, and to ride taxis or buses underground, because the city has gained some of its fame thanks to the many underground roads connecting different zones that would be impossible to traverse in a straight line on the surface. Guanajuato is like a “gruyere” made of dark stone, this is of course the perfect set for all those mummies legends you will surely hear. This underground street was built in the early 60’s of the last century and was originally the cause of the “rio Guanajuato”, a river that still traverses the city, with a respectable body of water when it rains, mostly in summer, but relegated, and not always resigned to use what is now the third underground level of the city.
Now, in the western part of Guanajuato, very close to the old train station that was mentioned before, you will find the famous graveyard that has been preserving and shaping the bodies of the dead ones. Its official name is “Panteon de Santa Paula”, an old place that opened its doors to the dead in 1861. This was the first civil cemetery in the city, this is, it didn’t belong to the catholic church and was open to receive people from all social strata. They all shared the same destiny, rich and poor, they were simply dead. But surely none of them imagined before dying that they would also share another destiny, to become the “local team” known as the Guanajuato mummies :-0.
The first mummies in Guanajuato were discovered well into the XX century, when the first exhumations took place in order to liberate some space for the new generations of dead bodies that needed a place in the graveyard. The first oficial mummy was the body of a French physician that was exhumed and for the great surprise of the cemetery’s workers they found a body that was amply preserved, with the beard and most of its face intact, except for the eyes of course. It even had the nails and most of the skin in his hands. His name was Don Remigio Leroy.
This was only the first of the many mummies that were to be discovered in Guanajuato’s cemetery. By the early 1970’s there were hundreds of them in the galleys of an old building next to the graveyard, where workers placed them in a dark collection of highly preserved dead bodies. All of them were stored without any protection, with most of the mummies standing against the walls of a long alley with white walls, in a pretty dantesc scene that can still be seen in old postcards that were sold in the city for the tourists visiting those days and that were the first to learn about “Las Momias de Guanajuato”.
Immediately after their discovery a number of people began to question how or what process was responsible for the preservation of the bodies in such a good state after so many years since they had been buried in the cemetery. After some technical studies, what is known now is that the cool temperature, low humidity and minerals in the soil of the cemetery are the major contributors to the great preservation state of the mummies in Guanajuato.
In a nutshell, Guanajuato is a place with an altitude of 2000 m above sea level, that makes it a place with mild weather, though lately summers can be somewhat hot, temperature rarely rises above 32 °C (90 F). In winter you rarely, and I mean rarely, get below 0°C (32 F). Though air is mostly cool throughout the autumn and winter season. Rain falls mainly in the summer season, one of the reasons you rarely experience high temperature in the city, and the rest of the year air is mostly dry, with winds that can be really hard to deal with, especially if you live in one of the houses on the top of “la cañada”.
Guanajuato is also a former miner town, this means the soil is charged with minerals of many kinds. It used to be a soil charged with silver and gold, but not these days anymore, though there are still some mines working in the eastern extreme of the city’s premises. But the mummies are not preserved in silver or gold, they have simply absorbed a cocktail of minerals that mixed with the conditions mentioned above have contributed to the high degree of preservation you can observe these days. More than 100 years after the first bodies were buried in the soil of Santa Paula, unsuspicious they would be exposed to the light again and not only that, but that they would be exhibited in a museum as a mummy :-O.
Since the mid 1970’s “las momias de Guanajuato” became the main attraction for many tourists visiting this city. They travel many miles, driving or by plane, to meet these peculiar ”guanajuatenses”. These dead bodies, who would have imagined, haven’t found eternal rest. They are now hard working Guanajuato citizens, to such a degree they have become of vital economic importance that these days, believe it or not, constitute almost half of the public revenue of the municipality.
This is why the museum that preserves the hundreds of mummified bodies has seen a number of renovations in the last decade, with the idea of modernizing the access and infrastructure of the building. But also thinking about the continuous and extended preservation of the “arid bodies” as they are called in proper scientific terms. They are no longer exhibited in bare and dark alleys where you could even touch them. There are stories of people that took pieces of the mummies as souvenirs, and also of a few people that even suffered from heart arrests and died in the very museum, after an ill equilibrated mummy fell on his back simulating a dismal hug directly from the afterlife.
But don’t be scared, now they are all behind transparent cages made of crystal and with special ventilation and temperature controls so you can meet them without the dark and dismal connotations of the early days of the museum, when its former old walls and alleys looked more like an altar to the dead, inviting you to run from the building. Times have changed, buy your ticket and take the tour, the museum is open from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm, and you will even meet baby mummies :-0. In no other place in the world you will be able to find such a varied and well preserved collection of mummies as “las momias de Guanajuato”.
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