For years we heard stories about the culture, the beauty and how friendly a city San Miguel de Allende was to visit.
In fact readers of Travel & Leisure Magazine voted San Miguel de Allende ”…the best city in the world” for the year 2017.
One of the things that likely influenced that designation was the large expat community that calls San Miguel home and the impact those people have had on the city.
When we talked to Mexican friends about plans to visit places like Chiapas and Valladolid, their eyes would light up and they would tell us about how much we would enjoy those places for the chance to see “Real” Mexico.
But when we talked about possibly visiting San Miguel de Allende the most common response would be a polite compliment about the beauty of the place and its reputation for cultural and culinary excellence but we could almost sense a bit of (not really) resentment but there was something that might be described as a lack of enthusiasm and I have to think that over the years maybe that colored our decisions on whether to visit there or not.
But when we planned our visit to Mexico for August 2019 we decided we had waited long enough and we would spend 4-nights there.
So now that we’re back; our overall impression is that it’s a wonderful, beautiful place full of friendly people. While the architecture in the old city center (Centro) is a mix of colonial and Gothic and the streets are cobblestone, this is a very modern and progressive small city.
SMDA, as it is known to many, is located in the state of Guanajuato and the city center sits at an elevation of 6,200 feet. We had the sense that some creature from outer space had created this amazingly green little jewel of a city and just dropped it down in the middle of the semi-arid Central Plains of Mexico.
It takes a little effort to get there. We flew from Cozumel with a stop in Mexico City and then took a private car for about an hour and 15-minutes to the city. To read more detail about our trip and see some other options for travel there see Getting to San Miguel de Allende.
This is a city of some really great restaurants, bars and hotels and we go into probably more detail than you care to read on our San Miguel de Allende Restaurants page.
On our first full day in the city we arranged a tour the historical city center with the Patronato Pro Niños (PPN) charitable organization.
On our second day we took a walking tour of Charco Del Ingenio, the natural plant botanical gardens of San Miguel.
And on our third day in the city, we spent a couple enlightening hours at Galería Atotonilco with owner and curator Mayer Shacter shopping and enjoying the hand crafts he’s collected from across Central and South America.
You can read more about all three of those days at our Things we did in San Miguel page.