Mexico’s missing mummy mystery

WITH ITS steep hills, candy-coloured buildings and winding passageways, Guanajuato has a claim to be Mexico’s most beautiful city. Its main tourist attraction may be the country’s most ghoulish. The Museum of Mummies, set underneath the city’s Santa Paula cemetery, contains 117 specimens. They are encased in glass, some standing, some recumbent, clothed and naked, their faces alive with agony. When local media reported in May that 22 mummies had gone missing, the city’s living residents grimaced.

The claim comes from Paloma Reyes Lacayo, who was the museum’s chief between 2015 and 2018. Mistrustful of its current managers, she requested an inventory. Some of the mummies did not appear on it. Locals suspected that someone in the city’s hierarchy had purloined its patrimony. Nonsense, says the city’s cultural director, Jesús Antonio Borja. The mummies are all present and accounted for.