One of the forms of land tenure during the viceregal period in Mexico was the hacienda, whose origin dates back to the second half of the 16th century and is closely related to the granting of grants and encomiendas from the Spanish crown to the first peninsular who they ventured to populate the newly conquered territory.
As the years passed, these gifts and benefits, which at first consisted of only a few leagues of land, the occasional Indian and very few animals for work, gradually became a powerful socio-economic unit of vital importance for development. of the New Spain world.
We could say that the structure of the haciendas was made up, in general, by a housing center called "casco", in which was the "big house" where the landowner lived with his family. Also there were located some other houses, much more modest, destined to the trusted personnel: the bookkeeper, the butler and some that others foreman.
An indispensable part of every farm was the chapel, in which religious services were offered to the inhabitants of the farm and, of course, all of them had barns, stables, threshing floors (a place where grains were ground) and some humble huts that they used the “acasillados laborers”, so called because as payment of their salary they received a “house” in which to live.
The haciendas proliferated throughout the vast national territory, and depending on the geographical area, there were so-called pulqueras, henequeneras, sugar, mixing companies and others, according to their main occupation.
As regards the Guanajuato Bajío region, the establishment of these farms was closely related to mining, commerce and the Church, which is why, in what is now the state of Guanajuato, we basically find two types of farms , those of benefit and agro-livestock.
PROFIT HONORS
With the discovery of the rich silver veins of what would later be known as Real de Minas de Santa Fe in Guanajuato, their large-scale exploitation began and the population began to grow disproportionately thanks to the arrival of eager miners thirsty for silver. This resulted in the production of ranches dedicated to mining, which were given the name of beneficiation farms. In them, the extraction and purification of silver was carried out through the "benefit" of quicksilver (mercury).
With the passage of time and the technological advances of the mining industry, the method of benefit of quicksilver was falling into disuse and the monumental mining estates were gradually divided; Due to the growing demand for housing, they were abandoning their main activity to become small residential centers. Towards the end of the 19th century, the city of Guanajuato had already been formed on the lands from which they were divided, which were giving their name to the oldest neighborhoods of the population; the estates of San Roque, Pardo and Durán formed the homonymous neighborhoods.
Due to the current advance of the urban area, most of these constructions have disappeared, although we can still find some homesteads adapted to the needs that modern life imposes on us and, in our days, they already function as hotels, museums or spas and One or the other is still used as a home-room for a Guanajuato family. But, unfortunately, some of us only have the memory of their name.
In other mining areas of the state, the abandonment of the enormous mining estates was due, to a great extent, to the depletion of the veins or to the “aguamiento” (flooding of the lower levels). This is the case of the mining town of San Pedro de los Pozos, near the city of San Luis de la Paz, where today we can visit the ruins of what were once prosperous profit farms.
FARMING FARMS
Another type of farm located in the Guanajuato Bajío area was dedicated to agriculture and livestock, taking advantage of the fertile soils that made the region famous for its installation. Many of these were in charge of supplying all the necessary inputs to those dedicated to mining and, in the case of those administered by religious, to the conventual complexes that also abounded in the area.
Thus, all the grains, animals and other products that made the existence of the prosperous mining industry possible, came from the farms established, mainly, in rural areas of the current municipalities of Silao, León, Romita, Irapuato, Celaya, Salamanca, Apaseo el Grande and San Miguel de Allende.
Unlike the beneficiation farms, which saw an end come to an end due to the evolution in the techniques of exploitation of the material or the exhaustion of the veins, the decline of the large agro-livestock producers was mainly due to the new agrarian law promulgated to As a result of the armed movement of 1910, which came to put an end to several centuries of landlordism and exploitation in our country. Thus, with the agrarian reform, most of the land on the haciendas of Guanajuato (and the entire country) were converted into ejidal or communal-type properties, leaving, in the best of cases, only the “big house” held by the landowner.
All this caused that the helmets of the formerly prosperous estates were being abandoned, which caused serious and irreversible damage to the buildings. Many of them, due to the high degree of oblivion and deterioration in which they find themselves today, have no other future than that of their total disappearance. But fortunately for all Guanajuatenses, as of 1995 the State Subsecretariat of Tourism has implemented a program, in coordination with the current owners of some of the haciendas, to try to find alternatives that allow avoiding the loss of such beautiful and historic buildings. .
Thanks to efforts like these, we can still admire across the entire length and breadth of Guanajuato a large number of farms in a magnificent state of conservation that, although fractioned, allow us to go back imaginatively to those times in which the coming and going of people it was a prodigious reality that filled with life an entire stage in the history of Guanajuato.
