Mexico's Fair Capital — the Bajío city where the Feria Nacional de San Marcos draws 9 million visitors for Mexico's largest annual fair, Orozco's most personal murals fill the Government Palace, and a deep underground network of tunnels built before the Spanish arrived runs beneath the colonial centro
Aguascalientes is a prosperous, clean, mid-sized city in Mexico's Bajío highlands — perhaps the most underrated of Mexico's colonial cities for travellers. The Feria Nacional de San Marcos (held in late April and early May) is Mexico's largest annual fair, drawing 8–9 million visitors over three weeks to a vast fairground with bullfighting, cockfighting, amusement rides, concerts, artisan markets, and the famous Palenque (a 12,000-seat concert arena where Mexico's top performers headline nightly). The city's Centro Histórico is compact and walkable: the Cathedral (1704–1738), the Palacio de G…
Aguascalientes takes its name from the hot springs ('aguas calientes') that dot the region — volcanic thermal springs that attracted settlement long before the Spanish arrived. Pre-Columbian peoples, primarily the Chichimec nations (a collective term for the nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples of central Mexico's highlands who resisted Spanish colonisation for 50 years in the Chichimec War, 1550–1590), inhabited the region. The Spanish founded Aguascalientes in 1575 as a fortified town on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (the royal road linking Mexico City to the silver mines of Zacatecas and be…