312 DIVISIONS POPULATION CITY OF GUANAJUATO. 



The State of Guanajuato is divided into four departments or pre- 

 fectures: — 1st. San Miguel de Allende ; 2d. Leon; 3d. Guana- 

 juato; 4th Celaya; whose capitals or chief towns bear the same 

 names. The possession by this State of the great and celebrated 

 Veta Madre which passes nearly through its centre, and of the wide 

 and prolific plains of the Bajio and of San Felipe renders it equally 

 valuable as a mining and agricultural region, and divides it fairly 

 between the two branches of industry. Its population may be esti- 

 mated at about 560,000; twenty-five per cent, of which comprises 

 the whites, thirty-six per cent, the mixed races, and thirty-nine per 

 cent, the Indian. Guanajuato contains three cities, four market- 

 towns, thirty-seven villages, and four hundred and fifty estates, plan- 

 tations and farms. 



The capital of the State is the city of Guanajuato, or Santa Fe 

 de Guanajuato, situated in 21° 0' 15" north latitude and 103° 15' 

 west longitude from Paris, about 6,869 feet above the level of the 

 sea, according to the measurement of Burkhart, and containing be- 

 tween 35,000 and 40,000 inhabitants. The town is perhaps the 

 most curiously picturesque and remarkable in the republic. " En- 

 tering a rocky Canada," says a recent traveller, " the bottom of 

 which barely affords room for a road, you pass between high adobe 

 walls, above which, up the steep, rise tier above tier of blank, win- 

 dowless, sun-dried houses, looking as if they had grown out of the 

 earth. You would take them to be a sort of cubic crystallization 

 of the soil. Every corner of the windings of the road is filled with 

 buildings of mining companies — huge fortresses of stone, ramparted 

 as if for defence. The scene varies with every moment; — now 

 you look up to a church with purple dome and painted towers ; 

 now the blank adobe walls, with here and there a spiry cypress or 

 graceful palm between them, rise far above you, along the steep 

 ledges of the mountain ; and again the mountain itself, with its 

 waste of rock and cactus, is all you see. The Canada, finally 

 seems to close. A precipice of rock, out of a rift in which the stream 

 flows, shuts the passage. Ascending this by a twist in the road 

 you are in the heart of the city. Lying partly in the narrow bed 

 of the ravine and partly on its sides and in its lateral branches, it is 

 only by mounting to some higher eminence that one can realize its 

 extent and position. At the further end of the city the mountains 

 form a cul de sac. The CaKada is a blind passage which can only 

 be left by the road you came. The streets are narrow, crooked, 

 and run up and down in all directions, and there is no room for 

 plazas or alamedas. A little triangular space in front of the cathe- 



