The Enigma of the Guanajuato Mummies… Tragic Tales from Mexican History.

In this world there are countless strange things, things that are difficult to understand, and even things that can never be understood, from injustices, wars, UFO sightings or why Chueco Gaitán separated himself from Los tigres. The article presented here reports on a fact of the same characteristics. It is a peculiar fact, but at the same time it is dark and macabre. This story begins with a discovery, the discovery of the mummies in the Mexican city of Guanajuato. No, they don’t get up at night to wreak havoc on the citizens.

What is really impressive, apart from the phantasmagorical vision that these well-preserved bodies provide, is the history that they hide.

The mummies can be seen in the mummies museum in the city where they were discovered, Guanajuato. In this museum you can see a large collection of naturally formed mummies. Analysis found that the bodies of the mummies were buried in the 1830s, while the region was ravaged by a cholera outbreak. This whole matter would not have been known if it had not been for a circumstance that occurred in that region…

The government created a tax for the space of the cemetery, although that measure was not accepted by all citizens, some very poor…

If those taxes were not paid, the law said that the body should be subjected to exhumation. Bodies were dug up, handed over to families, and they decided what to do with them. They literally threw the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ on them. In this way, many families who were not willing to pay that tax or who simply could not afford it received their deceased relative.

In total, 90% of the buried deceased were removed from their resting places. That was when everyone was surprised, instead of finding bones, which was what they expected, they found something else…

Instead of bones they found very well preserved mummies. The mummies were then allowed to stay in a building that was situated within the cemetery, where they resided until the early 20th century. It was then that some cemetery workers saw in these mummies a good business opportunity, since the mummies had become very famous in previous years.

So they decided to charge a few pesos so that anyone who wanted to visit the mummies could do so, paying. This is how this place became the museum that it is today.

But why haven’t the bodies decomposed? How have these mummies been formed? The people of the area speculate the reasons, and that is that those infected with cholera used to be buried alive, and the disease itself preserved the bodies in a strange way. In this museum that can still be visited, there are many curiosities, among them, that of the smallest mummy in the world, this was caused by the fact that a pregnant woman died of cholera…

But science recently uncovered the real reason. The main cause was the soil of the Guanajuato region, which has unique characteristics. The soil of the cemetery had nitrate and alum and other conditions that made it, together with recently buried bodies, become and preserve mummified forms.