Sunday, February 1, 2015

The Guanajuato Mummy Museum

The Guanajuato Mummy Museum, which sees more than 4,000 visitors a week, charges tourists £2 to gape at more than a hundred dried human cadavers, all of which have been disinterred from graves in the cemetery next door. Behind flimsy glass cabinets, the museum displays murder victims, criminals who were buried alive and infants laid to rest dressed up as saints – a Mexican belief that it will ease their passage to heaven.

 The Guanajuato Mummy Museum - owned by the state government - was recently voted as one of Mexico's best tourist attractions by users of one of Mexico's most popular tourism websites. The human remains have been preserved due to the method of burial in the Saint Paola Cemetery next door.  Corpses, 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'















All photos credit: Alasdair Baverstock via The Daily Mail

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