Bars and Tacos on a Guanajuato Night Tour in Mexico

Went to do some bar hopping in Mexico while grabbing some taco stand food along the way? This could be a bit dicey on both counts if you’re just winging it, but not on a bar and tacos night tour of Guanajuato.

For several years now I’ve run a street food tour company in my sometime home of Guanajuato, Mexico. For the first year I ran all the tours myself, partly because nobody else was doing it (the classic “hole in the market” business opportunity) and partly because it was an excuse to get me out of the home office and enjoy the sunshine.

Fortunately it was a modest hit out of the box and has gotten great reviews on TripAdvisor. I stopped running the tours when I moved back to Tampa Bay for my daughter to finish high school, but that actually helped me grow the business. Now I’ve got five great bilingual guides in place who know what they’re talking about. They do a better job than I ever did in leading an in-depth historical Guanajuato tour. Now we’re past 80 positive reviews and going strong.

Drinking and Eating Through Historic Guanajuato

Every once in a while someone would be on one of our street food tours and ask, “Why aren’t there any taco stands around?” We would eat tacos sometimes on the tour, but had to go to a permanent taco joint to do it. That’s because in most of Mexico, taco stands are a night thing. You’re more likely to see a taco stand at 2:00 a.m. than you are at 2 in the afternoon. We also got fairly frequent questions about where it was okay to go drinking at night. In a university city like Guanajuato, it’s a little hard to figure out which places are foreigner-friendly. Some are student dives, some are rough cantinas where you’ll likely encounter pushy local drunks slurring in Spanish you can’t understand. Few of them look all that inviting from the doorway, honestly.

So, as I revamped our tour site I worked with my guides to sort out a Guanajuato night tour we could add to the mix. It’s a combination pub crawl, street food tour, and city walking tour. At this point we’ve had more than 50 groups take us up on it and they’ve had a blast. They remarked that it was a great way to do a bar hop without having to be completely fluent in Spanish or to figure out which bars were going to work out well.

This is not one for the timid or those with a weak stomach though. The food is fine and not one customer has gotten sick that I know of, but typical tour participants usually end up drinking beers, micheladas, pulque, mezcal, and tequila to get a real feel for Mexico.

It’s all on foot though, with no taxis to take unless you need one to get back to your hotel. (If you do, it’ll cost you $3 max.) Or for the hard-core types, the guide can drop you at a place where you can party til dawn if that’s your thing.

Your Guanajuato Night Tour

Prices are subject to change, but it’s usually around $35 per person. That includes four or five drinks, some street tacos, Mexican street corn, and a guide taking you around and ordering everything. There are discounts for groups of three or more.

Of course we’re still running the original daytime city tour in Guanajuato, which samples all kinds of street food and gives you a lot of historical background on the city during the walking tour. Ideally it’s best to go on this soon after arrival to get a sense of the layout and the history, but for the Guanajuato night tour it doesn’t matter so much. Follow any of the links for more information.

I’m back in Guanajuato as my home base now, so if you get in touch while I’m in town I might even join you for a pub crawl.