El Jardín Principal (Allende Garden)

The plaza was designed in the French style, with wrought-iron benches and Indian laurel trees. Bands often play in its kiosk on weekends, according to Wikipedia, and the square functions as a gathering place for both residents and visitors. The garden is surrounded by historic buildings: the parish church of San Miguel Arcangel, the Casa de Ignacio Allende, the Canal House and the municipal palace all overlook it. The combination of shade, seating and landmark architecture makes it a natural starting point for exploring the town on foot.

The municipal palace on the square began as the Casa Consistorial in 1736 and was later heavily rebuilt. According to Wikipedia, on 17 September 1810 Miguel Hidalgo, Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama re-established the town government there, in the days just after the Grito de Dolores. Celebrations for the bicentennial in 2010 centered on the Jardin, and during the Fiesta de San Miguel Arcangel, whose feast day falls on 29 September, castillos, the spinning fireworks structures, are set up on the esplanade in front of the church.

The pink neo-Gothic parish, with its towers visible from most parts of town, forms the backdrop to the square. The church itself dates to the seventeenth century, with construction recorded around 1680 to 1685, and its interior keeps the original seventeenth-century layout, though much decoration was lost to looting. Its neo-Gothic facade was built in 1880 by Zeferino Gutierrez, an indigenous bricklayer and self-taught architect, in a redesign that Wikipedia places between 1880 and 1890. Inside is the Senor de la Conquista, made of cornstalk paste by artisans from Michoacan, and an inscription recalls that Miguel Hidalgo and his brother served as priests here.

In July 2008 UNESCO inscribed the Protective Town of San Miguel de Allende and the Sanctuary of Jesus Nazareno de Atotonilco as a World Heritage Site, reference 1274. The inscription recognizes the town's well-preserved Baroque colonial architecture and layout and its role in the Mexican War of Independence. Wikipedia reports that the inscribed area includes 64 blocks of the historic center, with a historic core of about 43 hectares in which buildings date mostly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

San Miguel was founded in the 1540s and re-established in 1555 at a site with two freshwater springs. Silver discoveries made it a key stop on the road to Mexico City, and by the mid-eighteenth century it was among the most prosperous settlements in New Spain. The town took Allende's name in 1826. After a decline in the nineteenth century, federal authorities began protecting its colonial character in the 1920s. The Escuela de Bellas Artes was established in 1938 by Felipe Cossio del Pomar and Stirling Dickinson in a former convent, and the Instituto Allende became an art institute in 1951, helping turn the town into an arts center. A private guided walk can link the garden to the church, the arts institutions and the surrounding streets.