Beauty and the Creative Feast

When the bells toll in San Miguel de Allende, it could be time for school — take some art or photography classes, improve your Spanish, and learn to make tamales

In San Miguel de Allende, tucked high in the mountains of central Mexico, the church bells are known to strike at odd and indecipherable times — a gong 12 minutes past midnight, 10 tolls in mid-afternoon, and then, one morning, 33 strikes at 8:22 a.m. "That makes it 33 o'clock," laughed my breakfast companion over an order of huevos rancheros.

The church bells broadcast San Miguel in sound: full of tradition but not in the least bound by it. This custom is lively, possibly mischievous, and completely charming, as long as you're not setting your watch by it.

Originally built by the Spanish in the 16th century as a stop between the silver mines of Zacatecas and the Gulf Coast ports, San Miguel looks time-arrested. Its ochre adobe façades shelter historic haciendas arranged around lush interior courtyards filled with bougainvilleas and palms. Cobblestone streets ascend and descend at improbable, slippery-when-wet angles. Among the town's many churches and bell towers, the central La Parroquia cathedral stands out. The soaring, rosy-hued, filigreed temple looks like a Gothic model created by a Mexican colorist — which is precisely the case. In 1880, stonecutter Zeferino Gutiérrez reportedly designed a new, multiturreted façade for the town's central church, marking the start of San Miguel's artistic swagger.

In the 1940s and '50s, San Miguel began to attract artists and wanderers who discovered the town — located about 33 miles from Guanajuato — well preserved, not far from natural hot springs, and blessed with a sunny climate that at an elevation of 6,400 feet keeps daytime temperatures pleasantly in the sixties. Founded in 1950, the language and art school Instituto Allende enticed World War II veterans to stretch their GI Bill benefits, drawing a wave of émigrés to the town. Now, second-home owners from 32 countries are among the expatriates who make up an estimated 10 percent of the population of 140,000. In 2008, Unesco officially recognized San Miguel's beauty, naming the town a World Heritage Site.

But San Miguel is no mere glamour queen. Scratch the surface and you'll find a scholar. Witness the public library, perhaps the liveliest building in town when the bells chime, unexpectedly, at 11:12 a.m. In addition to offering books on loan and places to study, the library also screens foreign and independent films. (During my stay, Once, an Irish movie, and If I Never See You Again, an independent Mexican film, were on the bill.) A busy bulletin board advertises an upcoming flamenco concert in the library's muraled Quetzal Room, a wine reception at an art gallery in a renovated factory building, and San Miguel Poetry Week, with readings taking place around town. Apart from the umbrella-shaded tables, the scene could be right out of Ann Arbor or Berkeley. San Miguel de Allende resembles a college town, with the exception that it can't be bothered with prerequisites or diplomas, making it a magnet for learning vacationers.

With many local schools to choose from, teaching art, language, cooking, and more, I put together a curriculum for my one-week visit to this culturally curious town. Taking classes taught by expats and by locals, in English and in Spanish, using my hands and my mind, I encountered a variety of San Migueleños, natives as well as interesting characters from all over the world who have landed here.

Center Square

Visitors commonly root themselves in San Miguel's center, a verdant square shaded by manicured Indian laurel trees fronting the imposing cathedral. In the cafés that flank the square, patrons sipping coffee and limonada sit under the arcades. At night dozens of mariachis linger in the plaza, waiting for couples to commission a song. If it weren't for my date with a wedge of clay at Joan Elena Goldberg's ceramics studio, I might never leave. But clutching e-mailed directions, I walk into a quiet residential neighborhood of stonecutting yards and taco vendors, of curbside mechanics and uniformed schoolchildren.

From her rooftop patio, Goldberg spots me on the street and waves me up to her sun-flooded third-level studio, where a large white cat dozes in the front window. As we listen to flamenco music, Goldberg, chalky streaks of clay on her black pants and mad coils of dark hair escaping a barrette, demonstrates how to work the damp material, rolling out a slab, placing it over a convex form, and adding clay knobs that will eventually become the nose, mouth, and eyes of a mask.

"A lot of people visiting San Miguel want to enhance their experience by doing something in the creative arts," says Goldberg, a San Francisco native who has lived here for almost nine years. "Insurance actuaries who never did a creative thing in their lives come and do trompe l'oeil painting for the first time and leave having had an exalting experience."

Indeed, on another morning I meet a British potter and two New York retirees in town for a month's stay, all of us assembled in Rebecca Peterson's ground-floor studio in the quiet Colonia San Antonio neighborhood, not far from Goldberg's studio. (Nothing is beyond walking distance in town, but if you must cab it, you'll never spend more than 25 pesos on the ride.) Peterson, originally from Santa Fe, N.M., and a Mexico resident for the past 13 years, teaches the art of the nicho, a kind of three-dimensional collage centered in a hinged, glass-covered box surrounded by a punched tin frame.

Traditionally, nichos - adapted from the word niche - were created as devotions to the saints, and the form took off in San Miguel, which is famed for metal craft. Now, artists make nichos with secular themes as well, and the nurturing Peterson, exuding balance in her white smock, black apron, and smooth dishwater-blond bob, teaches the method around a large work table opposite a pocket kitchen where, between her patient instructions, she cooks an elaborate lunch for the midday class meal.

"When you see something beautiful or moving, it momentarily stops your breathing," says Peterson, who directs us to forage through her collections of seed pods, dried flowers, miniature dice, plastic Barbie sandals, mirror shards, rusted bottle caps, and shells, all housed in separate glass jars. "When I get this feeling, that's when I glue something down."

We paint and paste things on and within nichos shaped as stars, ovals, hands, and castles. "It's like being a kid again," declares the suddenly boyish potter, "choosing all the materials and then playing with them."

Crafting an Itinerary

At 5 p.m. each day of my visit, I meet tutor Javier Escobedo Reyes at the Academia Hispano Americana (AHA), one of the many language schools in San Miguel specializing in in-depth courses. Most students enroll for one or two weeks; the intensive program follows a daily schedule of conversation, lectures, and field trips that acquaint them with español - not only the language but also the culture and context. For visitors with limited time, like me, the school offers one-on-one tutoring. So it is that I spend an atmospheric hour each day in the leafy courtyard of a colonial-era building, working on my Spanish while chatting about soccer, travel, and the merits of tequila.

In addition to studio tours, the classes offer entrée behind the walls that surround San Miguel's historic mansions. Many of these colonial mansions are decorated with local crafts and fine art in a look I've come to think of as San Miguel Classic. That look is epitomized by my room at Casa de Liza, a bed-and-breakfast in a 17th-century hacienda with gilt-framed art on the walls and funky, hand-painted wood carvings on the patio. Shopping for accessories of similar style, I slowly troll the three-block-long Mercado de Artesanias, or artisans market, where vendors selling locally made decorative metal frames and lanterns sit alongside others selling painted talavera pottery from Dolores Hidalgo (a nearby city), native Huichol Indian bead art, and Oaxacan carved animals.

Long famous for its crafts, San Miguel has more recently become a collector's town. Fabrica La Aurora, on the northern edge of town, was once the leading local employer, manufacturing textiles until it closed in 1991. Now the building, a warren of rooms, some still quartering boilers and looms and other castoffs of industry, houses high-end design studios, antique shops, and serious galleries. In one, Noyola Antiquarios, I find an early Diego Rivera, several Frida Kahlos, and a local or two. Diego Noyola Fernández, the museum's owner, gestures to a landscape by painter Leonard Brooks. "He was the artist who drew all the others and established San Miguel as an art center," Fernández says. "He's brilliant."

Painting the Town

The next morning I find Brooks — still working at age 97 — in his firelit living room near the Instituto Allende. Before San Miguel hosted foreign film screenings or even had more than a few cars, Brooks arrived fresh from Europe and the front lines of World War II, where he worked as a painter for the Canadian Navy.

"When I came back and wanted to get away from the war, I heard about this place in Mexico where there were no gringos," says Brooks of his 1947 arrival. "I found the landscape and the city very inspiring." Wearing a navy blue beret and a paint-flecked plaid shirt, he points to two works he's completed in the past three days, including a painting of his walled garden.

If Brooks was among the first expats to land in San Miguel, Robert de Gast represents the second generation. The Netherlands-born photographer traveled the world shooting for magazines like National Geographic before settling here. Now, between publishing picture books, lecturing, and doing the occasional freelance gig, he tutors aspiring photographers.

"I think San Miguel is the prettiest town in Mexico," declares de Gast, whose vigor, ruddy face, and full white beard remind me of Santa Claus. We meet in the sunny courtyard of the Instituto for a lesson and a sort of artist's tour of the village, with the photographer extolling the pace of life here and its influence on his lens. We comb the Instituto with the aim of taking photographs of the galleries, arcades, and, in the distance, La Parroquia. Later we walk the blocks surrounding the school for more shots. "The town forces you to walk. When you slow down, you have more of an opportunity to experience the world around you. It makes you notice."

Local Flavor

Like many college towns, San Miguel offers the world on a plate. It almost seems as if more restaurants here serve international food — Italian, French, Chinese, Cajun — than Mexican. But in typical San Miguel style, there's a school where you can learn to make the local cuisine.

At the Sazón Cooking School, a state-of-the-art kitchen lodged in an 18th-century manse near the main plaza, chef Paco Cardenas is leaning across the stone counter regarding the class seated before him at white café tables, eager to learn the secret of making tamales. "Lard," says Cardenas, his hands reflected in overhead mirrors and broadcast on video monitors that allow students to see what's going on atop the stove. "Lard gives flavor and consistency to tamales. We don't eat tamales every day, so it's OK. And you must have lard for delicious tamales."

Nor are tamales everyday fare at the school, which offers instruction in a range of Mexican techniques from Oaxacan moles to Yucatecan marinades. Each Tuesday students are taken on guided field trips through the town's colorful food market, where they learn about homemade tortillas, tangy Oaxacan cheese, and epazote, an herb frequently used in Mexican cooking.

Cardenas, trim and tidy in his chef's whites, doesn't look as though he's ever overeaten. But his enthusiasm is infectious as he explains that tamales are fiesta food, the sort of dish that guests can assemble. For the next two hours he takes us through the steps of making the sauce (red and green), preparing the corn husks (soaked until pliable), shredding the chicken (boiled or roasted the day before), making the dough (this is where the lard comes in), and, finally, assembling. Taking turns, we spread the fillings in corn husks, fold up the packages, and tie them with strips of husk, like organically wrapped gifts. But the method is mutable, says the chef, who encourages his students to experiment as we dive into our tamale lunch at the end of class.

"Mexican cooking is very free," says Cardenas, unwrapping a steamed tamale de rajas. "There isn't any one way to do something. There are over a hundred ways, and they're always delicious. You don't need to follow a recipe. It's not pastry." Cardenas should know; when he's not teaching, he works as a pastry chef.

San Miguel Time

On my final night in town I head back to the library for a concert in the brilliantly muraled Quetzal Room featuring a local music legend. Sergio Basurto plays guitar and harp, offering everything from Hawaiian slack-key arrangements and Cuban ballads to Spanish flamenco standards and Uruguayan harp songs. It's a wide-ranging and astonishing repertoire that seems so fitting to internationally minded San Miguel de Allende. As I take a final walk past the mariachis, the couples, and even a pair of chess players in the moonlit square, the bells ecstatically toll 27 o'clock, though it's long before midnight.

— Elaine Glusac

Learning Logistics

Sazón Cooking School. Most classes about $42, including lunch. 52.415.154.7671, sazon.com

Ceramics with Joan Elena Goldberg. $150, including firing the piece. Shipment to the United States is available. 52.415.152.3844, joanelenagoldberg.com

Nichos making with Rebecca Peterson. $85, including lunch. 52.415.154.7010, mexrebe@yahoo.com

Photography with Robert de Gast. $50/hour. 443.321.8727, robertdegast.com

Spanish at Academia Hispano Americana. $200/week for full-time instruction, $17/hour tutoring. 52.415.152.0349, ahaspeakspanish.com

Spanish-language and art classes (including painting, weaving, silverwork, and sculpture) at Instituto Allende. Rates vary. 52.415.152.0190, instituto-allende.edu.mx

Where to Sleep

Casa de Sierra Nevada. A series of historic haciendas just a block from the main square sequesters 37 rooms, some with luxuries like plunge pools and espresso machines. Rates from $236. 800.237.1236, casadesierranevada.com

Casa de Liza. This former 17th-century estate is now a B&B with antiques in the rooms, a Jacuzzi in the lush garden, and elaborate breakfasts. Rates from $100. 816.256.8613, casaliza.com

Getting There: Continental offers nonstop service to León/Guanajuato from its hub in Houston.

---

Photographs: Macduff Everton