San Miguel de Allende

After originally thinking we’d spend a month in San Miguel de Allende, and enroll in another Spanish school there, we decided to stay just 5 nights after being persuaded by our friend, Robert, that a month would be too long. It was the right decision for us. San Miguel was a beautiful city and we enjoyed our time there, but we felt like we did just about everything we could have. It has a large American ex-pat community, which wasn't a bad thing; however, it gave us more of a "touristy" feel instead of a place we wanted to live for a month. It wasn't a great place for us to practice our Spanish either, since so many people spoke English. 

We stayed at Hotel Villa Mirasol, which was incredibly close to the main plaza where we visited the pink Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel. We spent most of our nights here drinking hot chocolate (yes, it was quite chilly), eating candied nuts, listening to live music, and enjoying the Christmas lights. We loved the hotel and they had a great made-to-order breakfast that was included.

We were within walking distance to the Parque Benito Juárez, which was a great place to relax in the shade. It was a big enough park to take a stroll around the paved walking paths, too.

One of our favorite things we did in San Miguel was spend the day soaking at La Gruta Spa. This was long overdue from our Camino de Santiago adventure! We were too busy drinking our margaritas and enjoying the hot pools and waterfall cave to take any photos to share, so feel free to check out their website here for a few photos.

We also spent an afternoon hiking around at Jardín Botánico el Charco del Ingenio. We took Uber there from our hotel since it was all uphill (come on, we walked over 800 kilometers not that long ago!) but we did walk the 30 minutes back afterwards.



Some friends we met at La Gruta Spa told us to go to the Rosewood Hotel rooftop bar for the best city sunset. They have an awesome rooftop with comfy furniture and the view was indeed amazing. We could see the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel and we enjoyed a cerveza and tapas as we watched the city light up.

San Miguel was a fun 5 days, especially because neither of us got sick. ;) We even went back for a night when our family came to visit us over the holidays. San Miguel is definitely more lively during the holidays compared to when we first visited in early December. But, it was time for us to make our move to Guanajuato and head back to school!