Private Guanajuato Mines Tour

Overview

Explore Guanajuato's mining heritage on a private tour that takes you into a real historic mine, alongside the city's colonial architecture, plazas, and fountains.

A private tour of Guanajuato's historic mines, visiting some of the most important mines in the area to discover the history and traditions of this integral part of the city's past. You'll enter a real mine, plus take in the stunning colonial architecture, plazas, fountains, and historic buildings of Guanajuato along the way.

Highlights

• Enter a Real Mine Descend into one of Guanajuato's historic silver mines, not just view it from outside.
• Colonial Architecture See the plazas, fountains, and historic buildings that silver-mining wealth built.
• Private Vehicle Throughout Travel in comfort without worrying about logistics.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

Explore Guanajuato's mining heritage on a private tour that takes you into a real historic mine, alongside the city's colonial architecture, plazas, and fountains. A private tour of Guanajuato's historic mines, visiting some of the most important mines in the area to discover the history and traditions of this integral part of the city's past. You'll enter a real mine, plus take in the stunning colonial architecture, plazas, fountains, and historic buildings of Guanajuato along the way.

Guanajuato's whole reason for existing traces back to 1548, when Spanish prospectors found rich silver deposits in these hills; the settlement was formally founded a few years later, in 1554, as Santa Fe Real de Minas de Guanajuato — literally, the royal mining camp of Guanajuato. By the 18th century this one district had become the single most productive silver-mining region on Earth, and historians' estimates of just how much of the world's silver passed through Guanajuato's mines during the colonial era range from roughly a fifth to as much as a third — numbers that are hard to pin down precisely, but that explain why this small mountain city ended up as wealthy and architecturally extravagant as it did.

The most famous single mine in that story is La Valenciana, a few kilometers north of downtown, whose main shaft was sunk by Antonio de Obregón starting in the 1760s and quickly became the richest silver mine on the planet. At its peak in the late 1700s, Valenciana is said to have reached roughly 450 meters underground and employed well over 10,000 miners at a time — and depending which historian you ask, it supplied anywhere from around a third to as much as two-thirds of the entire world's silver output during its best years. Its profits were so vast that the mine's owners personally financed the nearby Templo de San Cayetano, a gold-leafed Churrigueresque church built between 1775 and 1788 and dedicated to the patron saint of miners, which still stands right beside the mine today.

On this tour, 'entering a real mine' means stepping inside one of the district's genuine historic shaft entrances, or bocaminas — sites like the Bocamina de San Ramón, said to date to 1548 and among the very first workings in the whole Guanajuato mining district, or the neighboring Bocamina de San Cayetano, where former miners lead short underground visits through the original shaft. Back above ground, the same mining fortune paid for the plazas, fountains, and ornate facades that make Guanajuato's historic center — itself a UNESCO World Heritage Site — one of the best-preserved colonial mining towns anywhere in the Americas.