Ex-Hacienda de San Miguel Regla

Ex-Hacienda de San Miguel Regla is an eighteenth-century silver-processing estate built by the Conde de Regla, Pedro Romero de Terreros, one of colonial Mexico's wealthiest mine owners, whose Real del Monte silver holdings funded major public works in Mexico City. The hacienda functioned as a hacienda de beneficio, where crushed ore was refined using the patio process, a mercury-amalgamation method that dominated New World silver refining from the sixteenth century onward. Surviving structures include stone arches, a chapel, and processing courtyards built from the region's dark volcanic basalt, the same stone that forms the nearby Prismas Basálticos de Santa María Regla, natural hexagonal basalt columns the Conde's estate also encompassed. After silver production declined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the main house and outbuildings were converted into a hotel, and much of the original stonework, arcades, and chapel were preserved and restored rather than demolished, giving visitors a sense of a working colonial industrial estate rather than a purely ornamental hacienda. The grounds retain their original layout of courtyards connected by stone archways, with the former ore-crushing and amalgamation areas now repurposed as gardens and event spaces. Interpretation is informal, based on the visible architecture and occasional signage, rather than a formal museum circuit, so visitors piece together the site's industrial history from the surviving arches, mill foundations, and chapel rather than curated exhibits.