Welcome to the museum voted as one of Mexico's best tourism attractions, however it's not one for the faint-hearted.
About 4,000 visitors turn up weekly to the Guanajuato Mummy Museum, which i believe must rank as one of the most macabre and grotesque in the world.
Tourists pay £2 for a tour to see more than 100 dried human remains all of which were taken from the cemetery next door.
In there are criminals who were buried alive, murdered victims and infants laid to rest dressed up as saints, a local belief that it will ease their passage to heaven.
The corpses have been preserved due to the burial method in the Saint Paola Cemetery next door. The remains, rather than being buried in the ground are sealed inside air-tight crypts, where the lack of oxygen slows the natural rate of decomposition.
"The bodies dry out rather than putrefy, which leaves them in this state of mummification," says Jesús Saltillo, one of the tour guides at the museum.
"It leaves them all with an expression as if they were experiencing terrible pain", says Jesús, "but the vast majority died peacefully."
When a family’s lease on their loved one’s crypt ends, they are given 5 days to renew the payment (£95 for twenty years). If they choose to walk away, the body is then removed and given to the museum’s curator for inspection.
If the curator examines and finds its condition good enough to appeal to the huge numbers of visitors his museum receives, it is added to the collection there. If rejected, the corpse is sent to a common grave on the outskirts of town.
The first ever mummy to be disinterred was Remigio Leroy, known as the "French Doctor". A Frenchman who died during a visit to Guanajuato in the 19th century. The body was disinterred after twenty years inside a crypt in 1865, when the owners were amazed to find his almost-perfect preservation.
His condition, complete with the clothes he still wears for visitors today, aroused so much excitement in the mining town that the cemetery began to collect other well-preserved corpses for display, eventually establishing the dedicated museum in the 1950s.
The museum is renowned for its ownership of the smallest mummy in the world – a four-month-old foetus of a woman who fell victim to a cholera outbreak in the 1860s.
The foetus, no bigger than a pound coin, was found preserved still inside its mother’s womb when she was removed from her crypt and is today examined by visitors through a magnifying glass fixed above it.
The most recent addition to the collection was Baby Enrico, an infant who died at six months of age in 1999.
The museum is open seven days a week, although it closes for a day every two months in order to clean the mummies, many of whom are still wearing the clothes they were buried in.
“The clothes begin to rot before the bodies do," says tour guide Manuel Limón. “It’s vital that they are maintained."
The most famous, El Santo vs. The Mummies of Guanajuato, features the most famous wrestler from the country’s popular "lucha libre" sport, taking on the mummies as they come to life, executing perfect pile-drivers into their dried forms.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone enjoys their visit.
Peruvian visitor Maria Goncalves says in the middle of her group’s guided tour: "It’s terrifying, I feel sick to my stomach. It’s the terrible expressions the mummies all have that makes it so horrible."
And despite the museum’s macabre exhibits, guided tour groups of 15 or more pass through its hallways every ten minutes.
“We see even more on weekends," says Jose Martínez, who sells souvenir sugar effigies of the dried human remains at the museum’s exit. “Usually on Saturdays there’s an hour-long wait just to get in."
Culled from UK Mirror
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