SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE HISTORY

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For centuries, San Miguel de Allende has been an art colony, and a place that nutures creativity, as its many studios and galleries attest. The town, with its colorful walls, massive wooden doors, and breathtaking hillside views, enjoys a moderate year-round climate: daytime temperatures from 65 to 80 degrees, depending on the season.

Founded in 1542 as San Miguel el Grande, a stopover on the silver mine routebetween Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosi, it was renamed for one of its sons, Ignacio Allende, a hero in the war for independence in 1826 – and became San Miguel de Allende.

The center of town is the Jardin Municipal (city garden), perfect for visitors who want to soak up atmosphere on benches under sculpted Indian laurel trees. The Jardin fronts the remarkable La Parroquia, a neo-gothic church with narrow towers, constructed from pink stone. Legend has it that the local architect saw a postcard of a European church and vowed to duplicate it.

From Frommers

San Miguel de Allende mixes the best aspects of small-town life with the cosmopolitan pleasures of the big city. Still, San Miguel is quite assuredly a small town. But it offers such a variety of good restaurants, good music, and wonderful shops and galleries that urbanites can find themselves quite at home here--hence the town's escalating popularity with sophisticated international tourists. Like Taxco, it has been declared a national monument. Virtually all the buildings you see in the central part of the village date from the colonial era, and newer buildings are required by law to conform to existing architecture. Because so much of the city remains as it was during the days of silver mining, many of the hotels, restaurants, and shops along its cobbled streets are housed in beautiful mansions dating from those years.

San Miguel has a large community of Americans, some retired, some attending art or language school, and some who have come here to live simply and follow their creative muses--painting, writing, and sculpting. The center of this community is the public library in the ex-convent of Santa Ana. This is a good place to find information on San Miguel or just to sit around in the patio and read magazines and books. The little American colony gets along very well with the townsfolk and has had surprisingly little effect on the way of life here.

One of the most notable aspects of San Migueleña society is the number of festivals it celebrates; it is known far and wide for these, in a country that needs only the barest of excuses to hold a fiesta. The town celebrates so many festivals that the odds of coming upon one by accident are decidedly in the visitor's favor. Most of these celebrations are of a religious character and are meant to combine social activity with religious expression. People still practice Catholicism with great fervor here--going on one or another religious pilgrimage, attending all-night vigils, ringing church bells at the oddest times throughout the night (something that some visitors admittedly might not find so amusing).