San Miguel is a collection of churches, houses, shops and restaurants separated from the cobblestone streets by sidewalks barely wide enough for one person.

Colonial colors on Corregedora Street

It is said that San Miguel was founded by thirsty dogs. Friar Juan de San Miguel had founded a mission in a river bed that, like many in central Mexico, was blessed with water only occasionally. One hot day, his dogs wandered off and the Friar found them relaxing on the edge of a spring of sweet water. The Friar was so taken with the site that he moved his mission. If this story is true, we should have dogs found more cities. They picked a remarkable spot.

Hugging the steep foothills below the spring is the historic center of San Miguel, a collection of churches, houses, shops, art institutes and restaurants all separated from the cobblestone streets by sidewalks barely wide enough for one person, their fronts painted in colonial colors that butt next to each other creating pastel rectangles that climb and cross the hills. Squares and parks break the colored house fronts with open space and trees. Higher on the hills, views place San Miguel at your feet while stretching across the valley to mountains eighty kilometers away.

Corn seller in the Mercado de Artesanias

The streets are so narrow that, in places, burros deliver construction supplies much more efficiently than a truck.

To see San Miguel, you must do it on foot. The cobblestones limit driving speed to a fast walk anyway. Walking, you experience the carefully chosen colors of the houses and the details of their door knockers, many shaped like hands that seem to emerge from a hole in the door and, bent at the wrist holding a brass ball, invite you to lift them and let them drop. Walking, you enter the arched vaults of colonial churches or pass through the open doors of former houses now converted to hotels or restaurants to find yourself surrounded by the enclosed garden. You enter intimate sized shops converted from a single room in the owner's house or wander through stores the size of an entire hacienda containing dozens of rooms filled with artesanians' crafts from all over the region.

Some of the streets are so narrow that a VW barely passes and others now only accommodate foot traffic. In places, workers still use burros to deliver bags of mortar, plaster, copper pipes, and electrical cables--much more efficiently than a truck.

Walk to theJardín, San Miguel's compact central square, from any direction and you see the town's defining landmark, theParroquia, a pink stone church, with soaring, pointed gothic towers unlike anything else in Mexico. It was designed by a local stonemason who, it is said, was inspired by a French postcard and used a stick to make the architectural drawings in the sand. Lighted on weekend evenings, the church's normal dark silhouette asserts itself in a mosaic of highlights and shadows against the night sky.

The churches use their bells to communicate, and like dialogues between people, they go on and on.

One of the many inviting doors in San Miguel

Two thousand meters high, San Miguel's clear, dry air is almost completely transparent, allowing the sunlight to cast sharp shadows, adding contrast to the colonial colors and enhancing the visual mosaic. It does rain, from April until September, not as a dull gray rain, but as a daily script that begins with clear skies in the morning, followed by cumulous clouds at midday which coalesce into masses and build up thousands of meters above the mountains. From theMiradorabove the center of town, you can watch as six or more of thesetormentaslumber across the valley, each with sharply defined streaks of rain connecting it to its shadow on the ground below. As evening falls, lightning discharges illuminate the storms from the inside, the yellows and oranges making them appear to writhe and twist as they move. With so many of them active, the accompanying thunder claps meld into a continuous rumble that seems to come from all directions at once.

A dancer at the Festival for the Asunción de la Virgen María

When one of the storms moves over the city, the experience becomes intense. The rain quickly collects in the rough cobblestone streets and, on the upper side of town, turns them into small torrents. The torrents stream down the steep streets, joining together at each intersection, creating a white water rush. When these fast moving mini-rivers reach the bottom of the hill, they settle into shallow brown lakes that cover the hubcaps of any cars still on the street. By morning, the water is gone and the script starts over.

Days in San Miguel often begin with sounds. Besides dogs, and roosters, there are bells. The bells from different churches seem to communicate with each other. When one begins to ring its bells, often before the sun comes up, another will answer. Like conversations between people, once started, these dialogues, limited to a small number of notes, go on and on.

San Miguel is a city of many festivals. The festivals spawn parades that wind around the Jardín while the entire town crowds the square--children, parents, grandparents--eating cotton candy, ice cream, fresh papaya slices, and roasted ears of corn, blending on the edges with the marchers so that it seems like one large celebrating mass.

Street food is present not just during festivals. When walking, you are never far from the smells. Fresh tamales, wrapped in corn husks, sitting over steaming water fueled by charcoal impart a sweet sent to the steam that drifts along the street in the morning air. Corn sellers are everywhere, with their mounds of fresh ears of corn roasting inches above red hot coals, turning them with bare hands to ensure they cook on all sides. Served on a stick and rubbed with a lime dipped in chile, the kernels are spicy, brown and crunchy on the outside and sweet, yellow and soft on the inside.

Native plants in El Charco del Ingenio nature preserve

Mornings and late afternoons, the blue door bakery can be found by following the smell of baking bread down Reloj street. The staff carry large square metal trays filled with different kinds of bread from the ovens. As they slide these trays onto shelves people deftly pick up their selections with metal tongs, placing the rolls and loaves on their own trays to hand to a cashier who quickly counts them, drops them into a bag, collects the payment and then turns to the next customer. A bag of rolls, selected from cheese, plain and sweet along with a bottle of water makes a portable, tasty and inexpensive lunch.

Besides cobblestones and colonial colors, there is, right on the edge of town, a two hundred acre park, El Charco del Ingenio, filled with cacti and succulents. Here, thousands of branching opuntia over five meters tall dominate the landscape. In the evening they form silhouettes against the sun, their spines creating backlit golden halos.

In addition to walking, San Miguel is a city to spend time in, relax in, admire art, take an art or language class, listen to music, enjoy food and meet people. It's people, including several thousand Americans, value the beauty, sense of community, pace of life and safety that San Miguel offers. Its many small hotels, restaurants, language schools, shops and galleries make it an easy, pleasant and rewarding place to visit.