Marfil

Marfil was one of the four mining districts, or reales, that made up colonial Guanajuato, alongside Santa Fe, Santa Ana and Tepetapa: the Real de Santiago de Marfil, whose founding is dated to 1554. It lies about 4 km southwest of the state capital's center, downstream on the Guanajuato River, at 1,961 m. Today it is a locality of Guanajuato municipality with 33,184 people (2020), joined to the city by streets and housing estates.

Silver was not mined in Marfil; it was refined here. Along the river stood beneficiation haciendas, where ore was crushed in mule-driven mills called arrastres and mixed with mercury on wide stone patios, a process that ruined the health of many workers and killed others. In the late 17th century Captain Gabriel de Barrera founded a string of these haciendas bearing his name, including Barrera Grande, now a museum with seventeen gardens. In 1777 the Santa Ana hacienda, with ten arrastres, was sold for 10,000 pesos in gold.

The town rose with the boom and fell with it. It had 3,072 people in 1900; on 30 June 1905 a burst dam unleashed the great Guanajuato flood, which wiped Marfil out, and the 1921 census counted only 426 residents. By the mid-20th century the haciendas were ruins. In 1954 the Canadian painter Gene Byron and her husband, Virgilio Fernández del Real, bought part of Santa Ana and turned it into a home, studio and garden. Marfil was still close to a ghost town in the 1960s; then the city spread this way, and the population went from 1,404 in 1970 to 14,480 in 2000.

The Baroque church of Señor Santiago Apóstol, built between 1641 and 1695, is among the oldest of its kind in the region. After years of neglect it is being recovered, and it now hosts concerts of early and contemporary music. Between the newer houses, walls, arches and courtyards of the old haciendas survive, several of them reused as museums and event venues.