GUANAJUATO, MEXICO — Once upon a time, there was a city where people came from far and wide to kiss.
The place was blessed with gold and silver, but its kissing legend, passed down like an heirloom, made it rich beyond measure. It tells of a fair maid named Ana who fell in love with Carlos, a poor miner who lived across a narrow alley. The young lovers met on their balconies, stretching across the tiny gap to kiss in the moonlight.
But their love was star-crossed: Ana's father forbade the romance and threatened to kill his daughter if he discovered the lovers together again. The next night, he caught them and, true to his warning, stabbed Ana with a dagger. Dying, Ana reached out and Carlos kissed her hand -- the couple's final kiss.
The children of this city have learned this lovers' saga by heart and told it over and over to the hopeless romantics who come to see the spot, known as the Alley of the Kiss, and to share a good-luck kiss there.
So it came as a terrible shock to people here last month when word spread that the city's leaders had issued an edict: Kissing in public was forbidden. Violators would be punished.
The news set off a storm over smooching that, weeks later, still has tongues wagging in picturesque Guanajuato, a mining town in central Mexico -- and reveals a lot about the ways of Mexico, where you don't need to get a room to express your love for each other. Like any good Valentine's Day story, this one ends with a kiss.
The affair blew up in January, when Guanajuato's City Council, led by the socially conservative National Action Party, or PAN, approved an ordinance on public behavior to replace a 32-year-old law. The ordinance tackled problems such as unlicensed street vendors and jaywalking. But it also targeted offensive language and "obscene touching."
The mayor, Eduardo Romero Hicks, was asked what sort of public act would be punishable. He said the law would ban agarrones de olimpiada, which translates roughly as "Olympic fondling." (In an interview later, he explained that this meant "fondling far beyond the norm . . . extreme eroticism in public places.")
Garden-variety kissing, the mayor said, was never the target.
But leftist opponents depicted Romero and his PAN colleagues as latter-day inquisitors bent on imposing strict morals on the rest of Guanajuato, a tranquil town with cobblestone streets and hillside homes painted in eye-popping hues of orange, pink and electric blue.
