Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/380

312 The State of Guanajuato is divided into four departments or prefectures:—1st. San Miguel de Allende; 2d. Leon; 3d. Guanajuato; 4th Celaya; whose capitals or chief towns bear the same names. The possession by this State of the great and celebrated Veta Madre which passes nearly through its centre, and of the wide and prolific plains of the Bajio and of San Felipé renders it equally valuable as a mining and agricultural region, and divides it fairly between the two branches of industry. Its population may be estimated at about 560,000; twenty-five per cent, of which comprises the whites, thirty-six per cent, the mixed races, and thirty-nine per cent, the Indian. Guanajuato contains three cities, four market-towns, thirty-seven villages, and four hundred and fifty estates, plantations and farms.

The capital of the State is the city of, or Santa Fé de Guanajuato, situated in 21° 0' 15" north latitude and 103° 15' west longitude from Paris, about 6,869 feet above the level of the sea, according to the measurement of Burkhart, and containing between 35,000 and 40,000 inhabitants. The town is perhaps the most curiously picturesque and remarkable in the republic. "Entering a rocky Cañada," says a recent traveller, "the bottom of which barely affords room for a road, you pass between high adobe walls, above which, up the steep, rise tier above tier of blank, windowless, sun-dried houses, looking as if they had grown out of the earth. You would take them to be a sort of cubic crystallization of the soil. Every corner of the windings of the road is filled with buildings of mining companies—huge fortresses of stone, ramparted as if for defence. The scene varies with every moment;—now you look up to a church with purple dome and painted towers; now the blank adobe walls, with here and there a spiry cypress or graceful palm between them, rise far above you, along the steep ledges of the mountain; and again the mountain itself, with its waste of rock and cactus, is all you see. The Cañada, finally seems to close. A precipice of rock, out of a rift in which the stream flows, shuts the passage. Ascending this by a twist in the road you are in the heart of the city. Lying partly in the narrow bed of the ravine and partly on its sides and in its lateral branches, it is only by mounting to some higher eminence that one can realize its extent and position. At the further end of the city the mountains form a cul de sac. The Cañada is a blind passage which can only be left by the road you came. The streets are narrow, crooked, and run up and down in all directions, and there is no room for plazas or alamedas. A little triangular space in front of the