GUANAJUATO, MEXICO — Juan and Remigio and Ignacia and their closest neighbors can tell you a lot about life in this central Mexican mining town.
So what if they're dead?
They might be Guanajuato's most visited residents -- a collection of 56 mummified corpses that survived for years in remarkably good shape and now constitute one of the main tourist draws here.
The bodies, on display in Museo de las Momias, the city's mummies museum, were taken from above-ground crypts in a graveyard next door. Dating from the mid-1800s to the 1970s, they were removed because they were unclaimed or relatives hadn't paid burial fees. Long a ghoulish curiosity while in storage, the mummies were put on formal display starting about 40 years ago.
Don't look for Scooby Doo-style creepers trailing bandages -- most of these mummies are naked. They are dry as paper and coppery-looking, but often surprisingly complete, with tufts of hair on the face and body and, in some cases, clothing that still has some of its color.
Museum officials say the tightly sealed crypts kept marauding bugs out and the arid conditions allowed the bodies to dry intact even without the preservation efforts used in ancient Egypt.
"This is why these are the best mummies in the world," said museum coordinator Carlos Barrera Auld. "It's a natural mystery."
The bodies are encased -- some standing, others in repose -- in the museum building near downtown Guanajuato, where you can catch the bus labeled "Mummies." In several cases, names and bits of biography of the dead are known. They're miners, mothers, doctors, Mexicans and foreigners. They seemed to fall young.
One man, exhumed in the 1940s, had been stabbed to death, a golf-ball-sized wound visible in the parched husk beneath his rib cage. Another drowned in the 1970s. A woman from the 1920s is thought to have been buried alive after slipping into catalepsy. Her hands are frozen hauntingly above her face, apparently in mid-struggle to escape her grave. Nearby is a neat row of desiccated babies, some adorned with dainty cotton bonnets.
In the United States, this sort of exhibition might be relegated to an old-style freak show. But Mexico doesn't shy away from death. After all, families gather in cemeteries to share memories and celebrate departed loved ones at graveside on the annual Day of the Dead.
