Travel: More About San Miguel de Allende
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Mexico is a beautiful country, and its people are kind and helpful. If you do not know much Spanish, you will find that you can communicate quite well with some rudimentary sign language - and you will be surprised how many Mexican citizens know how to speak at least a little English. You will be entirely safe to walk day and night in San Miguel de Allende. The food is clean, fresh and nutritious. As in many countries around the world, you will be drinking bottled water, since Mexico's tap water is not for drinking purposes.
San Miguel de Allende mixes the best aspects of small-town life with the cosmopolitan pleasures of the big city. Still, San Miguel is quite assuredly a small town. But it offers such a variety of good restaurants, good music, and wonderful shops and galleries that urbanites can find themselves quite at home here -- hence the town's escalating popularity with sophisticated international tourists. Like Taxco, it has been declared a national monument. Virtually all the buildings you see in the central part of the village date from the colonial era, and newer buildings are required by law to conform to existing architecture. Because so much of the city remains as it was during the days of silver mining, many of the hotels, restaurants, and shops along its cobbled streets are housed in beautiful mansions dating from those years.
San Miguel has a large community of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans, some retired, some attending art or language school, and some who have come here to live simply and follow their creative muses -- painting, writing, and sculpting. The center of this community is the public library in the ex-convent of Santa Ana. This is a good place to find information on San Miguel or just to sit around in the patio and read magazines and books. The little English-speaking colony gets along very well with the townsfolk and has had surprisingly little effect on the way of life here.
One of the most notable aspects of San Miguel society is the number of festivals it celebrates; it is known far and wide for these, in a country that needs only the barest of excuses to hold a fiesta. The town celebrates so many festivals that the odds of coming upon one by accident are decidedly in the visitor's favor. Most of these celebrations in San Miguel de Allende are of a religious character and are meant to combine social activity with religious expression.
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