San Miguel

We are staying on this street.


On Saturday, March 21 we explored San |Miguel , visiting the Artesian
Market and participating in the festivities of the Jardin (town square).
At this time there was a Cuban Festival complete with Cuban music and
dancing. We participated with everyone in Salsa Dancing outdoors.

On Sunday, March 22nd, Gerald and I joined the hiking group in San
Miguel with some other people we had met previously. This is a picture of the canyon.

The three-hour hike
in Boca de Canada was along a river bed in the country, just twenty
minutes outside of San Miguel.

It was wonderful to see the different
vegetation, I.e., various cacti, thorn bushes, no insects, but
very hot mid morning. “Cowboys” on horses watching the sheep, goats on
the hills and river bed.

That evening, mush to everyone’s surprise, it rained. We went to the most
beautiful Starbucks, I have ever been in.


The tables and chairs were
arranged under a roof, while the centre of the hug outdoors contained
beautiful, large plants, stonework and wrought iron. San Miguel’s
architecture is beautiful with wrong iron in front of windows, doors and
beautiful wood doors framed with cement/stone .

Beautiful flower pots
decorate the stone gardens. The amazing Jacarando tree, with its
stunning purple flowers, currently in bloom, decorates San Miguel’s
landscape.

On Monday March 23rd, we decided to participate in the Historical
Walking Tour of San Miguel. We met the tour guides in the Jardin, early
that morning.

In the Jardin, we saw the little children dressed for the
first day of Spring Parade dressed in costumes of bubble bees,
butterflies, watering cans, flowers , etc.
Some of the sights we visited included the Parrouguia de San Miguel
Arcangel. This parish church’s pink ‘wedding cake towers dominate the
Jardin. The strange pinnacles were designed by indigenous stone mason in
the late 19th century.

The stone mason based the design from a postcard of a Belgium Church and
instructed builders by scratching plans in the sand with a stick. The
rest of the church dates from the late 17th century. Continuing around
the downtown of San Miguel there are many churches we visited and took
beautiful pictures.

The Oratorio de San Felipe Neri is a 18th century church with a pale-pink main
façade in the baroque with an indigenous influence. Inside the church are
33 oil paintings showing scenes from the life of San Felipe Neri, the 16th
century Florentine who founded the Oratorio Catholic order. The tour
included many churches and then we visited the Escuela De Bellas Artes,
the School of Fine Arts, which is housed in the beautiful former monastery
of La Conception church, which was converted into a fine-arts school in
1938.

The day continues with an interesting walk put on by the Hash House
Harriers. This international group has a motto we’re ‘a drinking club
with a running problem’ We follow a laid out course through town following a
trail of flour and chalk arrows. This grueling course took about 2 and a
half hours to complete and finished at one of the members, home. At the
host, Robert’s, home we enjoyed singing risqué songs, and drinking beer
while overlooking San Miguel. The picture is the view from a 'Hash House Harriers' balcony after a HHH hike.
Robert’s home was unbelievable -- see
pictures.

On the 24th, we went to Tuesday Market.
Here, we bought some clothes for
the house-warming party that afternoon, food, I.e., avocados,
strawberries, chicken (to cook). It was a very interesting, fun place to
visit -- see pictures.

In the afternoon we attended a house-warming for a couple who had bought a
condo about 10 minutes from the Jardin in another interesting part of San
Miguel.

Their home was beautiful as were the grounds, with an exercise
facility (see pictures) a Jacuzzi, and a large, very warm swimming pool
with a swim-up bar.

On Wednesday, a friend of our friends, a woman from Walkerton, invited us
to go to Pozos for the day in her 1989 Ford Grande Marquis -- a spacious
limousine which rides comfortably on the cobblestone streets.





Less than
100 years ago, Mineral de Pozos was a flourishing silver-mining centre of
around 70,000 people, but with the 1910 revolution and the flooding of the
mines, the populations dwindled to less than 2,500.





Empty houses, a large and unfinished church and discarded mine workings and shafts were the legacy of abandonment. Today, this tiny place is trying valiantly to win
a place on the map. We explored the crumbling buildings, fascinating
surroundings, including several mine ruins. The picture of the gas pump is in San Miguel and it is a fixture in the area that has been there for quite some time. When we saw it, it had been returned after being taken away to be fixed.