Real del Monte

When Cornish miners arrived in 1824 to work Real del Monte's silver veins with steam engines, they packed their world with them - and this 2,700-metre mining town in the Hidalgo fog has never quite unpacked it. The paste is the delicious proof: the Cornish pasty, adopted and nationalized with fillings from potato-and-meat to mole and frijol, sold warm at every corner and honored each October with its own festival and museum. Above the red corrugated roofs and steep white lanes, the Panteon Ingles keeps the miners themselves - hundreds of graves in an oak-shaded English cemetery, nearly all facing their homeland. The mines that drew them are museums now: the Mina de Acosta runs surface tours through headframes and machine halls, part of the district's listed industrial heritage. Real del Monte also stakes football's founding claim in Mexico - the miners' club here is cited as the country's first - and the fog that rolls through most afternoons only sharpens the sense of a Cornwall relocated to the sierra.

History

The Otomi called the place Magotsi, "high pass", for the mountain route it commands, and the Spanish renamed it Real del Monte. The Pachuca and Real del Monte district is estimated to have produced 1.2 billion troy ounces of silver, 6% of the world's silver over the last five centuries, and the older houses with steep roofs and chimneys show the 19th-century Cornish and English influence (Wikipedia, Mineral del Monte).

What to look for

• The pastes - Cornwall's pasty gone gloriously Mexican.
• The Panteon Ingles - the miners' oak-shaded English cemetery.
• Mina de Acosta - headframes and halls of the silver era.
• The lanes - red roofs, white walls and mountain fog.

When to go

October for the Paste Festival; any season otherwise - the mist is part of the town's character, and clear winter mornings open views over the sierra.

Good to know

At 2,700 metres the air is thin and afternoons cold - bring a layer regardless of season. Streets are steep; the cemetery requires a keyholder or posted hours. Weekend paste queues at the famous shops are real.

Nearby

Mineral del Chico's forest park, Huasca de Ocampo and the Prismas Basalticos, and Pachuca's clock tower all lie within forty minutes.

Key facts