San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: The Color of Joy

There are plenty of things to notice when you first arrive in San Miguel de Allende. The architecture is beautiful, the streets are made for wandering, and there are churches, courtyards, and enormous wooden doors that look as though they've been around long enough to have a few stories to tell.

But the first thing that really hits me is the color. It's everywhere.

Walk down one of the main streets and you'll see it. Turn onto a back street and it's there too. Duck into a little alley and somehow the color follows you in. Reds, oranges, yellows, pinks, blues, greens. And we're not talking about shy little hints of color here. San Miguel does not appear particularly interested in restraint. These are colors willing to be noticed.

A wall might be a deep golden yellow, the building beside it burnt orange, and the doorway a brilliant blue, with fuchsia bougainvillea spilling over the top. And somehow it works. Actually, it does more than work. It feels wonderful.

As I walk these streets, I've been thinking about why all that color affects me so much. San Miguel is certainly beautiful, but what I'm experiencing goes beyond simply admiring the buildings.

The color makes me happy. I mean that quite literally. There is something about spending hours surrounded by those warm reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows that seems to work its way inward. After a while, I begin to feel as cheerful as the buildings look. To borrow a little sunshine from the Temptations' song My Girl, even a cloudy day feels brighter here.

And because the color stretches from one building to the next, you're not simply admiring a bright façade and moving on. You're immersed in it.

There is actually some science behind the idea that color affects us. Psychologists have studied the relationship between color and emotion for years, and while it's far more complicated than saying yellow makes everyone happy and blue makes everyone calm, research does suggest that colors carry emotional associations. Yellow and orange, for example, are often associated with warmth and positive feelings. I don't need a scientific paper to tell me how I feel walking through San Miguel, but it's interesting to know there's some research behind the experience.

Color speaks to us. And San Miguel speaks pretty loudly.

It's hard not to notice the contrast with so much of the built environment back in the United States. Somewhere along the way, neutral became sophisticated. White. Gray. Tan. Greige, which I believe is what happens when beige and gray decide to have a child.

I understand the appeal. There is something peaceful and elegant about a simple room with clean lines and soft neutral colors. Carla, being a designer, could explain all of that far better than I can. But I also wonder whether Restoration Hardware has secretly taken control of the country. You walk into a beautifully designed house and everything is cream, gray, white, or some tasteful variation of oatmeal. The walls are neutral. The sofa is neutral. The rug is neutral. Even the dog starts to look a little out of place if it has too much color.

There's nothing wrong with any of that, of course. But then you visit a place like San Miguel, and suddenly your eyes wake up.

Here, color isn't something to be carefully rationed. There seems to be an understanding that beauty can be exuberant, that elegance doesn't have to whisper, and that a wall can simply be orange because orange looks wonderful in the late afternoon sun.

I love that.

I also think color tells us something about a culture. Anyone who has spent time in Mexico knows how deeply color runs through everyday life, from textiles and ceramics to markets, art, religious celebrations, and Day of the Dead traditions. It is part of the country's visual language, and San Miguel is a particularly beautiful expression of it.

The way those colors play against centuries-old stone, especially in the late-afternoon light, keeps stopping me in my tracks. If you're me, you take a photograph, and then another one about forty feet farther down the street.

What fascinates me is how color can change the way we see something. A narrow street that might otherwise feel dark and confining becomes warm and inviting. An old building that might look tired and worn suddenly seems full of character. The street is just as narrow and the building just as old, but the way we experience them is different.

Color changes the story.

And that brings me to joy. I've always thought of joy as something a little different from happiness. Happiness often depends on what's happening around us, while joy feels broader, more like an appreciation for being alive and getting to experience this remarkable world.

Beauty can awaken that feeling. So can music, a conversation with someone you love, or an unexpected act of kindness. And apparently, so can a wall painted bright yellow.

There's something wonderfully ridiculous about that. We spend so much time trying to figure out how to be happier. There are books about it, podcasts, retreats, therapists. Philosophers have been working on the problem for thousands of years. And then San Miguel comes along and says, Have you considered orange?

I'm kidding. Mostly.

Because I do believe the places we live in and visit affect us far more than we realize. Our surroundings aren't simply backgrounds against which our lives happen. The streets we walk, the buildings we pass, the light, the trees, the public spaces - all of these things influence how we feel and experience our days.

That may be one of the things I love most about being here. San Miguel doesn't ask me to search very hard for beauty. It keeps putting it directly in my path. I walk outside in the morning and there it is: a red wall glowing in the early sun, a blue doorway framed by purple flowers, or a narrow street where every building seems to have its own personality.

And when a place keeps offering you these little moments of pleasure throughout the day, they begin to add up. You feel lighter. You smile more. You begin wondering why anyone ever decided that every wall needed to be beige.

There are many reasons to fall in love with San Miguel de Allende, and Carla and I seem to discover more of them every day. But what keeps surprising me is how much happiness I find in something as simple as walking down a street and looking at the buildings.

San Miguel isn't simply a beautiful place to look at. At least for me, it's a beautiful place to feel.

And that might be reason enough to stay awhile.