A perfect day in San Miguel de Allende

San Miguel de Allende is a town that photographs so well it has become slightly suspicious of itself. Pink limestone, a wedding-cake church, bougainvillea over every wall, rooftops looking out at a valley in the high central Mexican desert. It is beautiful in a way that is almost too on the nose, and it has drawn a large foreign community because of it. Spend a day properly and the real town is still there, underneath the postcard.

It is small, walkable, and built on a hill, which means good shoes and a slow pace. Here is a day in it.

Morning. Eight to ten.

Start in the Jardín, the central square, before the heat and the crowds. This is the town's living room, a tree-filled plaza facing the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, the pink neo-Gothic church that is on every photograph of the town. A local architect built its facade in the 1880s, the story goes, working from postcards of European cathedrals, which is why it looks like nothing else in Mexico. Sit on a bench with a coffee and watch the square wake up: vendors setting up, old men reading the paper, the bells.

Have breakfast nearby, Mexican and unhurried. Enfrijoladas or chilaquiles and a café de olla, the cinnamon-spiced coffee, at a place with a courtyard. The town runs late and starts gently. Match it.

Late morning. Ten to one.

Walk the streets around the Jardín with no particular destination, which is the correct way to see San Miguel. The cobblestone is uneven and the hills are real, but the reward is around every corner: a heavy wooden door left open onto a courtyard, a wall in exactly the right shade of ochre, a view down a sloping street to the desert beyond. The whole historic centre is a UNESCO site, and unusually it earns it.

Make your way to Fábrica La Aurora, a former textile factory on the edge of the centre that has become an art and design centre, galleries and studios and antique dealers in the old industrial space. Even if you buy nothing it is one of the best places in town to spend an hour, and the cafe in it is a good place to sit. San Miguel has been an art town since the 1930s, when a Mexican-American art school drew painters here, and the creative pull is older and more real than the recent wave of attention suggests.

Afternoon. One to four.

Lunch at the Mercado de San Juan de Dios or the smaller food stands rather than the polished restaurants on the square. This is the central Mexican Bajío, and the regional food is excellent and unfussy. Look for a comida corrida, the set lunch of the day, soup then a main then agua fresca, for very little money, eaten among people on their lunch break. The fancy rooftop lunch can wait for another day.

After eating, escape the heat of the early afternoon. Visit the Templo de San Francisco or the Oratorio de San Felipe Neri, the quieter churches the tour groups skip, cool and dim and largely empty. Or do as the town does and retreat to a courtyard for an hour. San Miguel sits at nearly two thousand metres, and the sun at midday has weight even when the air is mild.

Late afternoon. Four to seven.

This is rooftop hour, and San Miguel is a rooftop town. Find a terrace bar with a view of the Parroquia, order a mezcal or a paloma, and watch the light change. As the sun drops, the pink stone of the church goes from rose to gold to something almost red, and the whole valley behind it softens. This is the hour the town was built to be seen in, and the one the photographs are all chasing.

If you would rather be at ground level, walk up to El Mirador, the lookout point a short climb above the centre, for the full view of the town spilling down its hill with the Parroquia at the heart of it. Time it for sunset and you will not be alone, but you will see why.

Evening. Seven onward.

San Miguel takes dinner seriously and late. The town has a real food scene now, from old cantinas to ambitious modern Mexican kitchens, much of it set in courtyards under the open sky. Eat slowly. The Bajío is a wine and mezcal region as well as the heart of Mexican ranch country, so a long table, good meat or a deep mole, and a bottle of something local is the move.

After dinner the Jardín fills again, and on many nights there is music: a mariachi band, a brass estudiantina leading a procession through the streets, the bells. Walk back through it. The square at night, the church lit pink above it, the town out and unhurried, is San Miguel at its best, and it is free.

A note

San Miguel has changed under the weight of its own beauty. There is a large American and Canadian community, prices have climbed, and some streets near the centre can feel more like a curated version of Mexico than the country itself. The town underneath is still here, in the markets, the neighborhood churches, the comida corrida, the families in the Jardín on a Sunday. Spend your day among those and the place gives you far more than the postcard it is so often reduced to.