Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato

A small museum at the Santa Paula Cemetery on the western edge of the city, displaying about a hundred naturally mummified bodies. The collection includes adults, children, and what is billed as the world's smallest mummy — a foetus extracted from a woman who died in childbirth. Some of the mummies still have the clothes they were buried in; the expressions on a few are notoriously distressing.

The exhibit is presented with a slightly old-fashioned, semi-ghoulish tone. Children's entry should be considered carefully — some find it fascinating, others terrifying.

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A story
The mummies were created not deliberately but as a side effect of the dry, mineral-rich Guanajuato climate, which naturally desiccated bodies in the local cemetery. They began to be exhumed in the 1870s when families failed to pay the annual cemetery fee, and someone realised the corpses could be sold to curious tourists.

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