Tim Leffel's Cheapest Destinations

Guidebooks for Colonial Mexico

Before departing to spend a month in Guanajuato earlier this summer, I looked high and low for guidebooks to the region and mostly came up short. Nearby San Miguel de Allende is Gringo central, but apparently most of those foreigners are residents rather than visitors because most publishers don’t seem to think there’s enough of a market to justify a book.

Thankfully there are exceptions. Countryman Press has out the one pictured at the top here. San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato is part of their Great Destinations series and I used this book on an almost daily basis. By concentrating on just those two cities, author Kevin Delgado was able to really dive in and cover everything in detail. Restaurant listings are full descriptions, not just a quick summary. A museum may get a whole page instead of just a passing reference. I found nearly all the information to be accurate and helpful.

It would have been nice if some of the 131 photos were in color and the maps could be better, but otherwise the only gripe I had with it was the organization. Instead of making half the book one city and half the other, each chapter (such as lodging or sightseeing) covers both. So if you’re mostly in one spot, you do a lot of flipping around the pages to skip sections you don’t need. This is nitpicking though: overall this is a guidebook I can heartily recommend and I promise it would take you weeks of time-consuming web surfing to find even half the content you’ll get here for 13 bucks at Amazon ($10 for the Kindle version).

The other book we used a lot had better maps but skimpier info: Lonely Planet’s Central and Colonial Mexico guidebook. This is a custom title only available at Amazon. It’s essentially the bound version of what you get when you just rip out the parts of a guidebook that you need and leave the rest at home. It’s the LP Mexico book, but with just Mexico City and the colonial heartland. We got a lot of use out of it though and I was really glad I had it when I took side trips to Leon, Zacatecas, and Aguascalientes—all covered in the book, with maps. You can get this at Amazon for $13.

There’s one other book you’ll see a lot of people carrying around: The Insider’s Guide to San Miguel de Allende. This is a thorough, updated expat-written guide to the city that you’d be wise to pick up if you’ll be spending some time there. It’s a hard one to find outside the city though, so you might as well just pick it up after you get there.

For a more literary bent, check out two books from Tony Cohan, who I had the pleasure of having dinner with in Guanajuato.  On Mexican Time is a trip back to what San Miguel was in the 1990s, when there weren’t five jewelry shops and boutiques on every block. I read Mexican Days: Journey into the Heart of Mexico right before I left home and it’s a great narrative that has bits from Guanajuato, San Miguel, and nearby areas.