La Mina de Valenciana is closed. In it can’t be closed permanently, because there are too many touristy shops at its entrance (which is big enough to accommodate more than just a few tourist buses). But it wasn’t open today. Only Boca Mina de Valencia, a much smaller, older mine a quarter-mile away near the Iglesia de San Cayetano, was open. It was underwhelming. Actually, I think any mine would be underwhelming. It’s a narrow, steeply descending hole in the ground.
My guide spoke only Spanish, and that right fast. I caught maybe a quarter of what he was saying.
The church itself [below] was gaudy: what you’d expect from an altar made entirely of silver and gold.
The mines of Guanajuato–and of New Spain in general–are more impressive as an economic memorial. How many empires were destroyed by their own inability to adjust to the massive inflation caused by the flood of 
silver and gold from the New World? The Ottoman Empire took five centuries to fall, but its refusal to act soon enough to counter the arbitrage opportunity provided by fixed silver-gold exchange rates shattered its finances. Or of the empires built? Northwestern Europe was forced to adapt much more quickly to the new financial regime because they had fewer economic alternatives (Spain and Portugal had mining, Italy in the Ottoman Empire trade). Anyway, interesting to see a hole the ground that proved as economically, socially and politically disruptive as the Bubonic plague in the 1300s, and industrialization in the 1700s and 1800s.