Event: Mexico - Guanajuato

Public Museum of Mummified Citizens

When:	Daily
Where:	Museo de las Momias
Costs:	peso60; 6-11 yrs peso30; students peso35; seniors peso15
Opening Hours:	9am-6pm

If you're a dead citizen of the little province of Guanajuato in Mexico you'd better make sure that you pay the rent for your graveyard spot, or you might be exhumed, mummified and put in the Public Museum of Mummified Citizens (Museo de las Momias).

Because of a unique law that is in force in this part of Mexico, graves in the local cemetery have to be paid for every five years (unless you're willing to pay an exorbitant initial payment, ie "buy" the grave). If you (or your family and descendants) fail to pay the rent, your body is exhumed and disposed of to make way for new arrivals.

Through some mysterious process that scientists have tried in vain to explain, a small proportion of the bodies that are buried in the local graveyard end up mummified. Exhumed mummies, rather than being destroyed by the local authorities, are put in the macabre Museo de las Momias, where they join an army of bodies, poised in all possible postures of death, that has been accumulating since the museum was started in 1865.

It is not only the death fetish of the Mexican imagination that has kept this museum going (visitors report an eerie, almost carnivalesque atmosphere among the visitors lined up outside): there is an air of supernatural mystery about the whole phenomenon. Scientists from as far away as Tokyo have analysed the bodies, trying to find an explanation, but no one has so far succeeded in understanding why five or six exhumed bodies every year have turned into mummies. Some speculate that the minerals in the soil are the cause, others hint more darkly at divine punishment for crimes committed in life, fearing that the bodies may be condemned to a perpetually moribund half-life of paralysed torment...

So if you're a "mummy's boy" (or girl), with a really morbid voyeuristic penchant, this is probably the place for you. Even if you're a hard nut, though, make sure you bring your dark sunglasses, as you may not want to see all the exhibits (shelves full of mummified babies, for example)... If you have an interest in these things, check out the only other known mummy-museum of this kind in the world, the Catacombe dei Cappuccini in Palermo.