Yuriria

The convent of Yuriria is not proportional to the town of Yuriria. This is the first thing you understand when you arrive, and it takes a moment to fully register. The town — population around 25,000, a flat grid of streets and modest houses and a market and a plaza — is a normal-sized Mexican small town. The convent is not a normal-sized anything. It is a fortress-church complex from 1550, built by the Augustinian friars who received the concession for this part of the Bajío, and it is enormous in the way that sixteenth-century Spanish colonial religious architecture is sometimes enormous: deliberately so, built to impress, to intimidate, to demonstrate the permanence and power of the new order in a landscape that had been arranged according to very different principles for a very long time.

I came from Celaya by second-class bus, a journey of about an hour and a half through the flat agricultural Bajío, arriving in the early afternoon when the light was still harsh and the plaza was mostly empty. The convent appeared at the end of the main street as I walked from the bus station: its stone walls three stories high, the Plateresque portal — carved stone in the elaborate early-colonial mode, a dense overlay of saints, plants, and architectural ornament — facing the small atrium in front. The church tower rises above, and the whole complex, seen from the street, occupies an area that would fit a substantial city block of any European capital.

The Convent

The Augustinian convent of Yuriria — formally the Convento de San Pablo — was completed in 1550 and is considered one of the finest examples of sixteenth-century Augustinian construction in Mexico, which is a field with serious competition. The Augustinians built their earliest conventos as genuine fortresses, combining ecclesiastical function with defensive architecture: thick walls, tower-like bell structures, small high windows in the nave, crenellated rooflines. The conversion was proceeding rapidly and not without resistance; the buildings needed to be places that could be held.

The portal is the building’s most celebrated element. The Plateresque style — named after the work of silversmiths (plateros), which the stonework was thought to resemble in its density and intricacy — is essentially late Gothic ornament applied to Renaissance architectural forms, and the Yuriria version is extravagant even by the standards of the period. Saints in niches, vines climbing columns, angels in the archivolt, the whole surface carved in a grey-pink stone that takes the late afternoon light differently from the morning light, which is part of why I went back to look at it twice.

The interior is more austere, as Augustinian interiors tend to be, the nave long and high-vaulted with the simplicity that the order preferred once past the portal. The cloister behind the church is the part I found most affecting: a two-story arcaded courtyard, the stone darkened with age, the proportions creating a quality of silence that is hard to achieve in buildings. I sat in the cloister for some time. There were no other visitors. A cat slept on one of the stone benches with the absolute conviction of an animal that has been sleeping on this bench for many lifetimes.

The museum in the convent’s former cells is modest — some colonial-period paintings, liturgical objects, a display on the Augustinian order’s evangelization work in the region — but worth the circuit for the sake of walking the upper cloister, from which you can see the lake.

The Lake at Dusk

The Laguna de Yuriria is the largest natural lake in Guanajuato and one of those Mexican lakes that is simultaneously beautiful and ecologically complicated. The water is shallow — rarely more than three meters deep — which makes it productive for birds and fish and difficult for the water quality management that three-quarters of a century of agricultural runoff and population growth has made necessary. There are projects to restore the wetlands around the edges. The birds, in any case, have not left: the lake edges support herons, egrets, ibises, and various ducks in numbers that I did not expect from a lake of this size and situation.

I walked to the lake shore in the late afternoon, about ten minutes on foot from the convent plaza. There is a malecon of sorts — a modest promenade — and a cluster of restaurants facing the water. The light on the Bajío lake at dusk is its own thing: the sun goes down fast in central Mexico at this altitude, and the sky goes through pink and orange and then a very clear blue that holds for about twenty minutes before it goes dark. The herons — a mixed group of great blue herons and great egrets, twenty or thirty birds — came in from the north in V-formations and landed in the shallow water near the reed beds at the lake’s edge. It was like watching rush hour on a much more elegant system.

I ate at one of the lakeside restaurants: chile ancho relleno de queso, a dark dried chili stuffed with local cheese and fried in egg batter, served with rice and frijoles and a spoonful of tomato salsa that had been on the stove long enough to concentrate into something rich and almost sweet. This is Bajío cooking at its most direct — not subtle, not complicated, entirely satisfying. The woman who brought it out said the chilis came from the market that morning. The cheese was from a local dairy two kilometers away. I ordered another beer and watched the herons.

The market comedor in town (on the street one block north of the main plaza) runs the same chile ancho relleno for somewhat less money, in a setting that is plastic chairs and formica tables and a radio playing norteño, which is also fine.

Practical Notes

Yuriria is a day trip from Celaya or from Salamanca, or a pause on a circuit that includes Moroleón (known for textiles) and Valle de Santiago (near the volcanic maar lake system of the Siete Luminarias). There is one small hotel in the centro and another near the lake; neither is remarkable, but both are clean.

The lakeside restaurants are concentrated near the malecon and are best in the late afternoon when the light and the birds align. The convent is open Tuesday through Sunday; closed Mondays. The portal is lit in the evenings, which creates a different effect from the daytime — the carved stone under artificial light is theatrical in a way that the building’s architects could not have anticipated but would, I think, have appreciated.

Getting there: From Celaya, second-class buses to Yuriria run roughly hourly and take about 1h30. From Guadalajara, go to Celaya (2h30 by highway) and connect. From Guanajuato city, the most direct route goes via Salamanca or Celaya; allow 2h total. There is no direct service from Mexico City, but buses to Celaya from Terminal Poniente are frequent.

When to go: November through April for the best weather and bird activity on the lake. The lake is most alive with migratory birds from October through February. Avoid August-September when rain is persistent and the lake can flood the lower sections of the malecon. The convent is worth visiting in any season — the interior is cool and pleasant even in summer.