Las Momias de Guanajuato

Nobody set out to make these mummies. An unpaid annual fee did it.

The Mummies of Guanajuato are naturally mummified human remains from Guanajuato City in Mexico. Most were exhumed from the Pantheon of Santa Paula municipal cemetery between 1865 and 1958, after annual burial fees went unrenewed and the individual burial niches were reopened for reuse.

The first to be publicly displayed was the French physician Dr Remigio Leroy. The discoveries came gradually, niche by niche, as the cemetery recycled its space. Over the following 93 years, until the exhumations tied to the burial tax ended in 1958, more naturally preserved bodies kept coming up. Because the preservation was so unusual, cemetery workers held back many of the best examples instead of reburying them, and that accumulation is what became the Museum of the Mummies of Guanajuato. During the late nineteenth century they were stored in a building above the cemetery.

It is now a major tourist attraction and a genuine subject of archaeological, forensic and conservation research.

Be clear about what you are looking at. These are not ritual burials or embalmed dignitaries. They are ordinary residents of a Mexican city, buried by their families, whose relatives stopped paying a fee, and who are now behind glass. The questions that raises are live ones. In 2024 Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History accused the Museo de las Momias of failing to follow conservation protocol when it reconfigured its displays, damaging at least one mummy. Local authorities answered that deterioration is neither new nor avoidable, given a history of visitors touching the remains and taking souvenirs from them, down to bits of clothing.

Guanajuato itself is worth the journey regardless: a colonial city built into a ravine, with much of its traffic running through tunnels under the streets.