Guanajuato: silver in the sierra, wheat on the plain

Most people who come to Guanajuato come to a city: the capital with its coloured alleys, San Miguel de Allende, perhaps León on business. The state as a whole is rarely looked at, and that is where the interesting part lies.

On a relief map, Guanajuato is not a uniform region. It is a step. And almost everything that sets the state apart, from where its cities stand to what they live on, depends on which side of that step you are on.

01 A state on two floors

Guanajuato covers some 30,600 square kilometres in the centre of the country and has around six million people spread over 46 municipalities. The population figure is misleading: most of it is packed into a relatively narrow strip in the south and west.

That strip is the Bajío, a high plain at roughly 1,700 to 1,800 metres, almost without relief, watered by the Lerma river and its tributaries. To the north and north-east the ground rises: first the central ranges, with oak forest a few kilometres from the capital, and beyond them, in the far north-east, the Sierra Gorda.

The city of Guanajuato, which gives the state its name, is not on the plain. It is up in the sierra, at about 2,000 metres. That choice, awkward as it seems, is the first clue to how the territory works.

02 Silver, wedged into a ravine

The capital was not founded where life was easy but where the ore was. From the mid-16th century a great silver vein was worked here, and the city grew along the ravine of a river, clinging to the slopes, with no room for the grid-plan main square of other colonial cities.

UNESCO, which listed it as a World Heritage Site together with its mines in 1988, describes it as the world's leading silver-extraction centre in the 18th century. Mines such as La Valenciana, on the outskirts, had their great moment then, and much of the city's Baroque and neoclassical architecture was paid for with what came up their shafts.

Living in a ravine came at a price: water. In the rainy season the river running through it rose suddenly and swept away whatever it met. The flood of late June and early July 1905 left dozens dead and destroyed part of the city, and afterwards the riverbed was enclosed and tunnels were dug to divert the water.

Over time those channels and tunnels became streets. Today part of the capital's traffic runs beneath the historic centre, where the river used to flow. It is not a design quirk: it is the answer found by a city with nowhere else to grow.

03 The plain that fed it

A mining city in the middle of the sierra does not grow its own food. It needs wheat, maize, meat, mules, leather and tallow for candles, and it needs them close by. The Bajío played that role.

Historians of the region agree that the boom in Guanajuato's mines drove commercial farming on the plain: the best-worked fields were those supplying the richest mining centres. By the late 17th century the Bajío was already called the granary of the colony, and in the 18th, the granary of New Spain.

The plain was also engineered. In 1548 an Augustinian friar had a canal dug from the Lerma river to a marshy area in the south of the state for irrigation and flood control; that is how the Yuriria lagoon came about, regarded as one of the first large colonial-era waterworks on the continent.

The plain's vocation is unchanged, though the product is different. Guanajuato is now the country's leading broccoli producer, with about 70 per cent of national output in 2020, most of it exported, above all to the United States. Irapuato, in the heart of the Bajío, presented itself for decades as the strawberry capital.

04 The towns along the road

Between sierra and plain, and between the northern mines and the viceregal capital, silver and goods had to be moved. That is why many of the state's towns were not born as places to stay but as stages on a road.

San Miguel de Allende, on the eastern edge, grew as a stopping point on the route linking the Zacatecas mines with Mexico City. Its historic centre, inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2008, is that of a prosperous town of merchants and landowners, not a mining town: straight streets on a gentle slope, large houses built around patios.

Dolores Hidalgo, a little further north, is in the history books because the independence movement began there in 1810; on the ground, though, what you notice is something else: a town of potters, with hundreds of glazed-ceramic workshops along its streets, and handmade ice creams in unexpected flavours, from avocado to mole, around the square.

The other face of the road is the towns that depended on a mine and lost it. Mineral de Pozos, in the north-east, had a mining boom in the 19th and early 20th centuries; falling metal prices around 1917 and the closure of the mines emptied the town by about 1920. Today it is a place of ruined ore-processing haciendas and chimneys standing in grassland, with a small centre that has slowly come back to life.

05 The sierra that never makes the postcard

To the north-east, past San Luis de la Paz, the state changes scale. The Sierra Gorda of Guanajuato is a land of canyons, entrenched rivers, dry scrub on the slopes and forest higher up, on the transition between northern and tropical flora.

In 2007 a biosphere reserve of some 236,882 hectares was declared here, spread across the municipalities of Atarjea, San Luis de la Paz, Santa Catarina, Victoria and Xichú. That is nearly an eighth of the state's area, and it barely features in the image people have of it.

Reaching Xichú or Atarjea takes mountain roads and dirt tracks, and that explains much of their character: small, thinly populated municipalities, tied more to rivers and hillside livestock than to the plain. If the Bajío is the Guanajuato that produces and the capital the one that is shown off, the Sierra Gorda is the one that stays apart.

06 Same seam, different cargo

The old contact line between sierra and plain is still alive; it just carries something else now. The cities of the west and south of the state, León, Silao, Irapuato, Salamanca and Celaya, follow one another in a row along the motorway crossing the Bajío, and an industrial corridor has formed between them.

León is the oldest case: Guanajuato makes around 70 per cent of Mexico's footwear, and the bulk of that industry sits in León and its neighbouring municipalities, in thousands of workshops and factories, many of them small. It is an old trade: León was founded in 1576 as a cattle town, and tanning hides soon gave rise to shoemakers.

The newest is the car. Guanajuato is the only state in the country with five vehicle assembly plants: General Motors and Hino in Silao, Mazda in Salamanca, Honda in Celaya and Toyota in Apaseo el Grande. All of them are on the plain, beside the motorway, following almost the same line along which silver and wheat moved for centuries.

07 How to travel it

The first practical consequence is that the state is understood by going up and down, not just forward. Climbing from the plain to the capital means changing worlds over a short stretch of road: from a flat horizon to a city with no horizon at all, wedged between slopes.

The second is that it pays to look at each place and ask which side of the step it is on. The capital is sierra and mine; Celaya, Irapuato or Salamanca are plain and farmland; San Miguel and Dolores are road; Pozos is what remains when the mine leaves; the Sierra Gorda is what both mine and plain left aside.

The third is practical and honest. The Sierra Gorda and the north-east need time, a car and slow roads. And the state's south-west currently carries specific restrictions: as of September 2026, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office advises against all but essential travel to the area south-west of highway 45D, which takes in corridor cities such as Celaya, Irapuato, Salamanca and Silao, and the US State Department, which rates Guanajuato at level 3, bars its staff from travelling on the 45D or south of it. The capital, San Miguel de Allende and the north of the state lie outside those areas. Check both advisories before you go, as they change. With that, the state stops being a collection of pretty cities and becomes what it is: a sierra that gave silver, a plain that gave food and the line of towns that stitched them together.