guanajuato: day four

I know, I know. Will the photo debauchery never end??? Close, amigos. Very close...

Let me say this, though. Guanajuato is a bit different from the rest of the Mexican colonial towns we've visited. This used to be the silver capital of the world for nearly three centuries (originally founded in the XVI century by the Spaniards) and produced nearly a third of the world's silver at that time. So you can see the incredible legacy of wealth from that time period interpreted in the ornate architechture of its churches, monuments and palaces.

So here we are visiting an old mine. They still have a few working mines in the area, but most of them are largely worked out.



















Then we visited another cathedral. Yeah, I kind of feel like if you've seen one, you've seen them all. But here you go, anyway. And more of the bodiless cherubs. Not at all creepy...

































The legend of El Callejón del Beso (The Alleyway of the Kiss) goes something like this...

Doña Carmen was the young daughter of a rich man of Guanajuato. She fell in love with a poor miner, Don Luis, but her father had a different plan for her: marry her off to a rich, Spaniard noble in order to restore his dwindling fortune. When the father found out about his daughter's love affair with Don Luis, he locked her up. But Don Luis did not give up and figured out a way to talk to her. A window in Doña Carmen's home looked out onto an alley so narrow that it was possible, leaning out the window, to touch the wall on the other side with a hand. He spent a fortune to buy the place on the other side of that alleyway and eventually managed to talk to his love on the opposite balcony. The father broke into Doña Carmen's room in a moment when the two lovers were talking, and in a fit of rage, he stabbed his daughter to death. Doña Carmen's hand, still in his, slowly went cold. Resigned to the inevitable, Don Luis left a tender kiss on that smooth, pale hand, now lifeless. And that is why this spot is called the Callejón del Beso. (total tourist trap)

Anyway. On this particular night, before heading home, we stopped for the hottest hot chocolate ever (I couldn't feel my taste buds for three days) and the most delish churros ever. I'm still dreaming about those caramel churros...