The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A corner of Mexico that is forever Cornwall
Pasties, Cornish flags, red telephone boxes, a football team… Richard Collett feels at home in a Mexican town 5,400 miles from the English county that forged its character
TI stop at the world’s only pasty museum, which is, surprisingly, not in Cornwall but in Pachuca
he crisp smell of baking pastry wafted from the kitchen as the waitress charged out holding a tray stacked high with oven-fresh pasties. On the wall was a black and white Cornish flag, a Union Jack, too, and a novelty red telephone box in front of which tourists seemed unable to resist taking selfies.
This could very well have been any touristy shop at Land’s End or St Ives, except the menu was in Spanish and there was a mariachi band keeping up a steady beat as the staff brought out bowls of salsa, jalapeños and refried beans to accompany the pasties. The temperature was also 25C, and it was only February: because this wasn’t Cornwall, this was Mexico.
I was in Pastes el Portal, one of the busiest restaurants in the Mexican mountain town of Real del Monte. Located two hours north of Mexico City, in the state of Hidalgo, Real del Monte – along with the larger neighbouring city of Pachuca, a 15-minute drive away – is a curious piece of Cornwall lost in Mexico.
The Cornish-Mexican Cultural Society calls this region Mexico’s “Little Cornwall” and tourists – bemused holidaying Mexicans, in particular – flock here for three things: to eat pasties (or pastes, as the locals call them), to watch football and to explore the mining heritage. All three were brought here or heavily influenced by Cornish immigrants who settled in Mexico from the 1820s until the early 20th century in order to revive the country’s mining industry.
Real del Monte’s Cornish heritage can be traced back to 1824, when the first mining families arrived from Cornwall to reopen the vacant silver mines. They brought with them modern steam-powered mining equipment and health and safety measures such as tin hats, which until then were lacking in Mexico. Over the course of the next century, thousands of families from Cornwall (and some from Devon) would emigrate here, also bringing with them Cornish traditions, such as pasty-making.
The Cornish legacy is still strong, and the main street of this former mining town is lined with bakeries, shops and restaurants – many, like Pastes el Portal, displaying Cornish flags and Union Jacks, and all serving freshly baked pasties to Mexican tourists.
Ciro Peralta, the owner of Pastes el Portal, was excited to hear my opinion on Mexican pastes: “We don’t get many British visitors here,” he said, “but Mexican tourists love our pasties.” In a strange parallel with Cornish history, Señor Peralta had spent his early years working down the mines, until they closed in 1974. Realising that the town’s Cornish heritage was in danger of being lost with their closure, he decided to open a Cornish-themed restaurant in 1975.
Peralta’s pasties are prepared using recipes passed down from the original Cornish settlers, but mixed with distinctly local ingredients such as coriander, chilli, jalapeños and refried beans. The pasties here are smaller than the Cornish variety, but Peralta explained that this is because there are so many different fillings to try.
On the menu at Pastes del Portal was the popular papa y carne (potato and
meat), which is the closest you will get to a traditional Cornish pasty, alongside frijole (refried beans), mole verde (a type of green sauce), and more unusual flavours such as Hawaiano (Hawaiian) and rajas con atun (tuna with a creamy pepper sauce). The choice of fillings might turn the stomach of a diehard Cornish nationalist, but a certificate on the wall proudly proclaims that Señor Peralta’s pastes won an award at the 2018 World Pasty Championships in Redruth, Cornwall.
Pastes are big business, and Peralta said there are at least 70 paste shops and restaurants in Real del Monte and Pachuca. There is high demand and fierce competition, but he suggested that his restaurant is the busiest because he is the only owner who, as far he knows, has actually visited Cornwall. He reminisces about taking the night train from London to Penzance, and the extortionate price of the pasties he encountered. “I paid 80 pesos!”, he told me. “I only charge 17 pesos here.”
Peralta directs me to visit the Panteon Ingles, or English Pantheon, where I find a plaque commemorating “Cornish Mining World Heritage” at the entrance to the cemetery where many Cornish miners and their descendants are buried. Distinctly British names line the headstones, and given that one memorial lists a Private John Vial who was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, there remained strong links to the homeland well into the 20th century.
Cornish wheelhouses and mining chimneys still dot the skyline of Real del Monte, but many more families also settled in the adjacent city of Pachuca, where the Cornish influence is also still strong.
On my way down the mountain road to Pachuca, I made a pit stop at the world’s only pasty museum – which, somewhat surprisingly, isn’t in Cornwall. The Museo del Paste opened in 2012, a testament to the region’s eagerness to embrace its Cornish heritage, and has since been visited by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall themselves.
Down in Pachuca, I found a larger but less touristy version of Real del Monte. The Cornish legacy is apparent in the main square, where you can find the 130ft Monumental Clock. It was commissioned by a wealthy Cornish mining magnate named Francis Rule in 1906, and it has exactly the same clock mechanism as Big Ben. In the square, you will discover Pastes Grenfell, nearby there is a Methodist church and the Museum of Mining, as well as many homes and buildings built with pitched roofs in the British style, rather than the flat type seen throughout Mexico. The final Cornish legacy is football: CF Pachuca, the oldest team in Mexico, was founded in 1901 by Cornish miners from Camborne and Redruth.
Cornish immigration petered out during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, but a love of pasties and a resurgent interest in the heritage means that Real del Monte and Pachuca’s Cornish foundations remain strong. For Señor Peralta, that’s important. “Without the Cornish, we wouldn’t be so prosperous now,” he said. “The mining and the pasties, they bring in the tourists, and without that income, Real del Monte would cease to exist.”
Intrepid Travel (0808 274 5111; intrepid travel.com) offers the four-day Mexico City Stopover tour from £393pp (excluding flights), taking in Mexico’s capital and the Teotihuacan pyramids, and leaving enough free time to visit Real del Monte and Pachuca. A daily bus connects them to the capital, taking roughly two hours and costing about £3 for a one-way ticket
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