We’ve added Guanajuato to our best cities lineup in recognition that more expats are beginning to discover Guanajuato, the color-splashed college town with a rich silver mining history and colonial past.
Guanajuato joins eight other cities that draw large numbers of expats to their communities. All nine cities can be accessed by clicking on Cities in our navigation bar, which will allow you to browse 11 topics of interest for each city. It’s a good way to get an overview of each city if you’re thinking of moving to or just visiting one of these best cities in Mexico for expats.
Guanajuato is a college town and the University of Guanajuato is the center of the city’s many cultural activities. With over 17,000 students – about 10 percent of Guanajuato’s residents – the university keeps things lively throughout the year.
The largest producer of silver in the world during the Spanish colonial period, Guanajuato now is the capital of the state of Guanajuato and a bustling university town of over 175,000 people. Unique to the city is its auto tunnels, built to divert traffic away from the center of the city. Guanajuato is also a designated World Heritage Site by the United Nations for some of the best-preserved examples of Baroque architecture in the Americas.
Because the city is set in a narrow valley surrounded by steep hillsides, its cramped streets often are too narrow for automobile traffic, so walking is a way of life in Guanajuato, even up the steep hills that surround the city. Guanajuato has a very Italian hill town feel about it with its callejones, the narrow streets and alleyways of Guanajuato. Over two-thirds of the homes in the central part of the city are accessible mainly from callejones, some of them are so narrow you can extend your arms and touch both walls.
In addition to our new Guanajuato city profile in Cities, you can get a real flavor of what life is like living there in our article, “The Urban Planner Who Fell in Love with Guanajuato.” The video of the interview is available on our YouTube channel.
Our next addition to the Cities section will be Mazatlán, another Pacific Coast expat hub, less than a day’s drive north of Puerto Vallarta.
