Mineral de la Luz

Mineral de la Luz sits high in the hills northwest of the city of Guanajuato, and its story is the story of silver. The San Bernabé mine, found on 11 June 1548, is close by: tradition says a muleteer travelling from Mexico City to Zacatecas stopped to rest and stumbled on the first mine of the Guanajuato mining district. The present town is younger. It was founded in 1842 beside a silver mine that had first been tried in the 16th century; in 1844, with the boom under way, Governor Pedro Cortazar ordered the settlement regularised and its streets laid out, and by 1851 some 24,000 people lived here. Its name joins the mine to its patron saint, Our Lady of Light.

On 16 March 1857 the Guanajuato Congress created the Partido de Mineral de la Luz, split off from Guanajuato, and in 1861 several villages of the Partido de San Felipe were added to it. The Revolution ended the boom: silver output collapsed and the town lost about 80% of its people. On 3 April 1911 General Cándido Navarro took it for Madero's side, and on 15 October 1928 Congress abolished the municipality and returned it to Guanajuato. Today it is a quiet community of cobbled streets, stone and adobe houses and abandoned shafts, with a pink-stone parish church and red dome facing the square and its bandstand.

Mexico's federal Tourism Secretariat (SECTUR) named it a Barrio Mágico on 17 January 2024, the first in the state of Guanajuato, at a ceremony led by Governor Diego Sinhue Rodríguez Vallejo and Tourism Secretary Miguel Torruco Marqués. A chamber music festival takes place in July and the Feria Nacional de la Plata in November. The town lies on the historic route from Guanajuato to the Cristo Rey monument on Cerro del Cubilete; nearby are a vineyard and the Sangre de Cristo stop, with museums of mummies, of the Catrina and of mining.