Point South Mexico - Real Estate and Lifestyle Magazine

San Miguel de Allende offers visitors seeking an adventure of the spirit a unique opportunity for personal growth.

A curandero’s (healers) broom standing upside down in the corner of an ancient stone house, fresh chamomile flowers on the floor sending up an intoxicating aroma. A painter at work on a dazzlingly colourful canvas, a vision she had in a dream the night before. A wildly gyrating group of dancers ranging from teens to people in their seventies, passionately expressing themselves in movement—dance as a personal sacred ritual.

Welcome to the Mexico of spiritual healing, inner exploration, and mystical seeking—a place of wonder amid the already exotic delights of a vibrant, centuries-old culture steeped in spirituality.

The highlands of central Mexico, long known for its splendid terrain and its gems of Spanish Colonial architecture, is also becoming a destination for travellers attracted to personal and spiritual growth. Mexico’s Seventieth Century hillside mining towns have always held a unique fascination for visitors. Today, the mystical aura surrounding places like San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato glows anew with both time-honoured and contemporary approaches to inner nurturance and transformation.

Traditional Spirituality

As a glowing gem in the crown of Colonial Mexico, San Miguel offers the visitor in search of inner growth the great legacy of its Catholic past. It is a city of churches and a community of devotion. Religious celebrations—seemingly every week or so—are celebrated with much enthusiasm and pageantry.

Seekers on a private spiritual journey can join in these solemnities and apply their meaning to inner circumstances: the literal meaning of Holy Week, for instance, is the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus; the metaphorical meaning for a visiting seeker can be his or her own transformational process from the “death” of the personal past to the rebirth of the future.

In San Miguel, the seeker will discover a community of like-minded people who are on their own inner search.

Walking the streets of San Miguel, has a spiritual quality in itself. Seven major churches in the small downtown historical district anchor a kind of public spirituality. The Parroquia, the largest and most iconic of the churches, was started in 1683 and styled on the Gothic cathedrals of Europe.

A tour of the other churches gives the visitor seeking spiritual solace a unique, mind-quieting experience: the Oratorio of San Felipe Neri, begun in 1712; La Salud, the Church of Our Lady of Good Health; La Conception, also known as Las Monjas (the Nuns), begun in 1755; the San Antonio Church, begun in 1762.

One of the most fascinating of the churches lies outside of San Miguel, only seven miles from the center of town, in the village of Atotonilco. The shrine there is considered so important an example of Colonial ecclesiastical architecture, that its restoration was recently undertaken by a grant from World Heritage Foundation of the United Nations, winning out again, among other more famous landmarks such as the Taj Mahal. It was built in the 1700s.