Mummies!!!

So Guanajuato is famous for their mummies, but these aren't mummies in the traditional sense...Apparently because of the high altitude, dry air, and all the minerals (tons of silver and gold in the soil) as well as salts in the dirt, bodies that are buried in the ground naturally mummify. It started 200 or 300 years ago, for some reason they were digging up bodies, but when people realized that the corpses hadn't decomposed it became something of a phenomemnon. At first they started putting them on to view in secret and up until recently you would go into the 'musueum' with a candle and view all the mummies just chilling there. Now the mummies are in a nice museum, behind glass, and temperature controlled. While it was a little creepy as they had some mummies there from 1985 (it takes only 5 years for a corpse to mummify here) it was interesting because the skin, hair, socks , shoes and some clothes remianed eerily in tact.

They still put bodies in here if your family doesn't pay taxes/fees on the burial plot, hence this is why my host mother has decided to be buried in a town 5 hours away. They even had mummies of people that had drowned (skin was stil bluish), buried alive, and stab wounds (skin was stained). Even though it was creepy, it was also pretty fascinating...