The Creative Spirit of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

This is our second time in San Miguel de Allende, and already it feels different.

We enjoyed it the first time. We thought it was beautiful, colorful, interesting, and certainly understood why so many people fall in love with the place. But second visits have a different rhythm. The first time somewhere, there is usually a list, even if we pretend there isn’t. We want to see the places we’ve heard about, find the market someone recommended, visit a museum, photograph the view. There is a certain amount of checking things off simply because everything is new.

This time we feel much less urgency. We already know what the Parroquia looks like. We know there will be another beautiful street around the corner. We aren’t trying quite so hard to understand San Miguel. We are simply letting it come to us, and I think we are enjoying it even more.

There is no question that San Miguel is a remarkably beautiful place. I wrote recently about how much the color here affects me - the warm reds, oranges, yellows and pinks, the flowers spilling over walls, enormous wooden doors, stone streets, and courtyards hidden behind fairly ordinary facades. That beauty is impossible to miss.

But on this visit, I am becoming more aware of something underneath all that beauty. It is harder to photograph and harder to point to, but Carla and I feel it everywhere. It is the creative spirit of the place - the sense that imagination is not confined to galleries or studios but has somehow worked its way into the life of the town itself.

San Miguel seems to have art running through it.

Part of that is because so many creative people have chosen to live and work here. Artists, designers, writers, photographers, musicians, craftspeople and others have brought their imaginations into the same relatively small place, and over time their presence has helped shape the character of the city.

Creative people have a way of doing that. They look at ordinary things and see possibilities, and when enough people with that instinct gather in one place, creativity starts slipping beyond the studio and into everyday life. You see it in a doorway someone clearly gave real thought to, a cafe that feels more imagined than simply opened, a courtyard that surprises you, or a wall that someone saw as something more than a wall.

Even some of the shops feel less like places designed merely to sell things and more like personal expressions of the people who created them. There is care in the way things are put together here, and you begin to sense that creativity is not something reserved for people who call themselves artists. It is simply part of the atmosphere.

That is what fascinates me most. Spend enough time around people who are continually imagining and making things, and some of that begins to affect you. You start looking a little more closely yourself.

I’ve certainly noticed it with my writing. I love writing wherever I am, but here the words seem to come more easily. Ideas often arrive while I’m simply walking through town, and by the time I get home I may already have several things I want to explore on the page. When I sit down to write, I feel slightly less like I am pulling the words out and more like I am trying to keep up with them.

Carla feels it too. As an architect and designer, she notices things I might walk right past - the relationship between color and texture, the shape of a doorway, or the way someone has transformed an ordinary room into something personal. We experience creativity differently, but both of us seem to come alive around it.

I don’t know whether creativity can literally become part of the atmosphere of a place. That might be a little difficult to prove. But sometimes it certainly feels that way, and perhaps there is nothing especially mysterious about it. We respond to our surroundings. Spend enough time among people who are using their imaginations and bringing ideas into the world, and it seems only natural that something in us responds.

Creativity gives permission to creativity.

San Miguel has been building this kind of culture for a long time. Its modern reputation as an international arts community began taking shape in the late 1930s, when artists and educators established schools here and encouraged others to come. After World War II, American veterans used their G.I. Bill benefits to study art in San Miguel, and over time the city became known far beyond Mexico as a place where people could come not simply to see art, but to make it. The great Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros taught here for a time, and institutions such as Bellas Artes and the Instituto Allende helped establish an artistic tradition that continues today.

The city has also become famous as an expatriate community and retirement destination, and you certainly see that side of it. But its creative life is not simply something left over from the past. People are still painting, designing, photographing, writing, making music and working with their hands here, while new generations continue adding their own ideas to what was already here.

That is the San Miguel that excites us most.

Carla and I have always loved artistic communities. We don’t need to know the artists or be invited into their studios. Simply knowing that all around us people are taking ideas that exist inside them and finding ways to bring them into the world changes the feeling of being here.

And I think this is where the distinction between beauty and creativity becomes important.

Beauty can happen without anyone intending it. A mountain or coastline can be beautiful simply because it exists. An old stone wall can become more beautiful through nothing more than time, weather and light. Creativity requires something different. Someone has to imagine what isn’t there yet and then make it real.

It might become a painting, a garden, a photograph, a meal, a building, or simply a room arranged in a way that makes you feel something. The form doesn’t matter nearly as much as the impulse behind it: looking at what already exists and wondering, What else could this become?

That impulse - to imagine what could be and then bring it to life - is everywhere here.

San Miguel would still be beautiful without its artists. The Parroquia would still rise above the Jardín, the architecture would remain, and late afternoon light would continue falling across those wonderful old walls. But I don’t think it would feel like the same place.

Generations of artists and other creative people have left more behind than the things they made. They have helped create a culture that values imagination itself. You feel it in the care given to everyday spaces, the appreciation for handmade things, and the ease with which old traditions live alongside new ideas. There is a sense here that making something beautiful, interesting, useful, or simply unexpected is a perfectly worthwhile way to spend a life.

That is the current beneath the beauty, and I don’t think you have to be an artist to feel it.

That may be the most remarkable thing about creative places. The people doing the creating are not the only ones affected. Everyone who spends time around that energy has a chance to respond to it. It may simply make you notice more, or become more curious. It may wake up an idea you had forgotten about or make you want to try something you have never tried before.

For Carla and me, that response probably comes easily because creativity is already such a large part of our lives. But I don’t think the experience belongs only to people who consider themselves creative. There is something powerful about being in a place where imagination is constantly being expressed around you.

I think that is part of why this second visit feels more fulfilling. We aren’t simply looking at San Miguel anymore. We are settling into its rhythm enough to feel some of what lies beneath the obvious beauty. We wander without always knowing where we are going. A doorway makes us stop. Music coming from somewhere changes our direction. We find a gallery we didn’t know existed or linger over lunch longer than planned.

There is no hurry to get San Miguel done. We are less interested in seeing it and more interested in experiencing it.

And the more time we spend here, the more I understand that generations of creative people have given San Miguel something that cannot be contained in a gallery, photographed, or even easily described. Their imagination has become part of the personality of the town.

That, to me, is the power of the creative spirit. It doesn’t simply produce art. It affects the people who come into contact with it.

The color of San Miguel and the beauty of its architecture certainly make being here a joy. But underneath all of that is something I find even more compelling: the human imagination, alive and at work, everywhere you look.

Maybe that is why this place gets under your skin. You arrive admiring what people have created, and after a while you find yourself wondering what you might create too.

For those of us who come alive around that sort of thing, that may be San Miguel’s greatest attraction of all.