San Miguel De Allende, 2019
I was in San Miguel de Allende for a wedding. What I found upon arriving in the city was a place very similar to another Latin American country with which I am deeply familiar: Nicaragua. My family is Nicaraguan, most live in or around Managua, and after college I spent a year living in the nation known for its many lakes and volcanoes. In particular, San Miguel de Allende resembled the Nicaraguan village of Granada, a small, walkable town located along the northern shore of Lake Nicaragua. Both locales are defined by Spanish colonial architecture, with bright colors, timeless courtyards and effortlessly romantic balconies and patios. There are plants everywhere, exploding from holes in walls and over-growing in giant pots wherever one looks. While Nicaragua is fairly humid all-year-round, especially near bodies of water, the air in San Miguel is dusty. San Miguel’s streets are mostly cobblestone, beautiful to look at and difficult to walk on, while the sidewalks are too narrow for couples to walk side-by-side. Known for an expat population of artists, San Miguel is vibrant, lively, and offers stunning surprises for those willing to duck into mysterious doors or hike through neighborhoods in the midst of transition. Hiding out in the open I stumbled upon the Live Aqua Urban Resort, a hotel & spa characterized by a modern design that embraces the rugged landscape into which it is built. On the other side of a few up-hill miles, through an entire neighborhood that appeared to be under construction, I found the Charco del Igenio, a nature preserve that made me feel like I was in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. Being in the Charco felt like traveling back in time, with crumbling stone walls and rotting water wheels proof that life was once more vibrant here. What struck me most over the course of four days was the violence inherent in San Miguel de Allende. Not physical violence, but a violence more natural, more aesthetic, more diffuse and passive. In addition to the streets making the act of walking a challenge in and of itself, there are also the endless wires stretching like webs all over the city, twisting onto random poles on random corners only to be spun out in other directions to be connected with objects near and far. The air is difficult to breathe, both because of the dirt and the town’s elevation, while the heat makes every excursion a mission to find someplace with air conditioning, a fan, or at the very least shade. The people all appear tired, sweaty, exhausted. It is only the super wealthy who ever appear relaxed and refreshed, and they are rarely caught outside of a guarded hotel, shaded restaurant or artificially cooled boutique. The pronounced income inequality manifests as barbed-wire and armed security and architectural design oddities such as spiked plates that imitate the natural growth of plants in order to fool would-be burglars. San Miguel de Allende is beautiful and violent, and in my estimation it is both of these things equally.
[All images captured with the Olympus PenF Half-Frame camera.]
