MEXICO: An unusual museum in an old Mexican mining town puts 108 corpses on display

Record ID: 304001

  • Title: MEXICO: An unusual museum in an old Mexican mining town puts 108 corpses on display
  • Date: 16th March 2007
  • Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (English) UNIDENTIFIED GERMAN TOURIST SAYING: "In Germany you have to respect and love about anybody died because you have to respect the died people and that is deep in my mind and so, is not so easy to do it like perhaps Mexican people do, and think easy about dying, about dead people also about mummies. So my respect is coming from Germany, and the German respect for death people is very high and serious."
  • Embargoed: 31st March 2007 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Mexico
  • Country: Mexico
  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment / Showbiz,Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVAEZJW2WCEUH6MBLXVDMRZNCWYK
  • Story Text: There's a grim and ghoulish site greeting visitors to the old Mexican mining city of Guanajuato - more than 100 corpses on display at the local Mummies Museum.
    The exhibition boasts 108 bodies - spanning the years from 1869 to as recent as 1985.
    The museum began thanks to unpaid bills - exhumations occurred when families stopped paying fees to the local Santa Paula cemetery for their deceased's spot. The bodies were preserved and lined up in the graveyard's basement. Curious residents stopped by secretly to take a look and interest grew so much over the years, that an official museum was established.
    Today, the museum's director Felipe Maciel Lopez says the museum's visitors just can't get enough.
    "People from all over the world come, we are talking about Europeans, Asians, South Americans, North Americans and also the people from our region in the state and from around Mexico. Eight hundred thousand people visit the museum each year, and on certain days up to as many as 9,000 people come in one day," museum director Felipe Maciel Lopez, said.
    Grisly death stories are popular with the crowds. Tour guides tell of the virtuous baker's wife found hanging. Her brutish husband, arrested and executed for the crime, protested his innocence to the end.
    No one really knows the truth to most of the stories, but the museum's visitors can't help but listen wide-eyed. The tale of the unfaithful woman who was buried alive is a crowd favorite.
    For some, it is a little too much.
    "In Germany you have to respect and love about anybody died because you have to respect the died people and that is deep in my mind and so, is not so easy to do it like perhaps Mexican people do, and think easy about dying, about death people also about mummies, my respect is coming from Germany, and the German respect for death people is very high," said one German tourist.
    The Mummies Museum claims to be the world's largest. A traveling exhibition of the corpses has visited seven Mexican cities since 2005 and will soon depart for an international tour that will include museums in the United States, Ecuador, Italy, Spain, France and China.
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