La colonia: quartering the city as a world heritage site

Guanajuato, Mexico offers a brilliant example of a city built on the extraction of mineral wealth in the 16th century that still retains the character of its colonial core.

Originally inhabited by the nomadic Chichimecas, Guanajuato was founded as a Spanish town in 1570–only later to be named as a ‘city’ in 1741 by King Felipe V of Spain. As a colonial Spanish city, it produced vast mineral wealth for the crown; becoming the world’s leading silver producer in the 18th century.

The city’s topography and its seemingly rhizomatic web of streets and subterranean passages and roadways are inextricably linked.  Both speak to its mining past and to the dance between the city’s hydrology–of which seasonal flooding required redirection of the river–its topography and the Baroque city that rises above it. The tangle of streets and seemingly chaotic Baroque urbanisation that produced the city we see today is a result of the wealth that emerged from the surrounding mines.

Much of that wealth can still be seen today. This may be partly due to the fact that the historic centre of the city was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988.  The historic centre, called the Colonia Central in Spanish, is also quartered urban space.

During my time in Guanajuato I began to think about the relationship between the Mexican Spanish word for ‘quarter’ [colonia] and colonialism itself: is quartering simply an act of colonialism on a smaller scale?  Quartered urban spaces are differentiated similar to their colonial counterparts; they serve their colonial master–in the case of the urban quarter the broader city structure–in multiple ways; and as different and differentiated as they may be they remain subject to rules from power structures that are out of their direct control.  I also wondered about the relationship between patrimonio mundial [world heritage] status and the differentiation, control and promotion of such sites.  Does world heritage status also act as a type of quartering?

Whatever the case may be, the historic centre of Guanajuato offers a glimpse into the colonial Spanish golden-age, but it also provides an opportunity to understand a more modern urban condition.