Arturo Morales Tirado is having a hard time concentrating. Dressed in a pressed shirt and sombre jacket, the 56-year-old is making a good fist of interpreting a complex architectural feature high up on a church wall. But he’s being interrupted with comic regularity by shouted greetings, proffered handshakes and affectionate kisses. He responds to each, the odd joke here, a high five or flirtatious wink there.

Arturo is both guide and local celebrity, it seems. This hint of a baroque personality lurking beneath an austere façade neatly mirrors his subject matter. Over three centuries of rule following the 16th-century conquest of Mexico, the Spanish sought to control the indigenous people by all means possible, including architecturally.

Their favoured Neoclassical style was imposed – but the people of San Miguel were having none of it. They embellished wherever they could, adding decorative swirls and florid flourishes. Little wonder that when Mexico’s War of Independence broke out in the early 19th century, the earliest skirmishes were here. The writing was on the wall.

‘You can’t control the real spirit of Mexican people,’ says Arturo, reaching over to bump fists with a Stetson-wearing passer-by. ‘We’re naturally exuberant.

The over-decoration of the Baroque style – this was an assertion of identity.’ He leads the way across a small plaza, a squat fountain spuming at its centre. Squeezed between sheer cliffs of grey limestone is the peach-hued façade of the Church of San Francisco. It is ostentatiously ornate, an implausible web of symbols and figurines. The centuries-old door at its base creaks on its hinges, sending a flight of doves skywards, their wings beating in the still afternoon air. 

San Miguel’s profusion of churches has earned it the epithet the ‘Florence of Mexico’. But if there’s a single motif to this 500-year-old colonial town, it’s colour. Streets of flat-roofed, stucco-fronted homes flow down the hillside like painters’ palettes: terracotta, paprika, ochre and vermilion, the vivid natural pigments enhanced by the peculiar clarity of light here, a mile up in the Guanajuato highlands. 

‘Mexico is a mega-diverse landscape bursting with energy,’ says Arturo, turning into a favourite street. ‘We take our lead from our environment.’

The street is narrow and silent. Heavy stone lintels and jambs frame oak doors that are hung with copper knockers shaped into lions or Aztecs, while iron balconies and railings bear the pleasing imperfections of the hand-wrought.

Drainage shoots protrude like muskets, giving the appearance of a town under siege. For a while it was. It took a decade for the colonial masters to be overthrown, during which time San Miguel was ostracised for inspiring the insurrection.

The Camino Real trading route connecting Mexico City with the silver mines in the north was diverted from the town and the population dwindled to a 10th of its 50,000 zenith. ‘Time stopped,’ says Arturo. It worked wonders for preservation.

Like the mist that enshrouds the streets in the early mornings, the harsh light of progress was kept at bay. 

Perhaps the only person better known in San Miguel than Arturo is the man who gave the town its suffix: Ignacio Allende, the extravagantly sideburned father of independence. His 18th-century mansion, now a museum, stands in the main square, opposite La Parroquia, the Gaudí-esque church that dominates the town’s skyline.

‘Hic natus, ubique notus’ reads the inscription above the door: ‘Born here, known everywhere’.