The Paste Trail: How Cornish Miners Fed Hidalgo

Silver, fog, and folded pastry: how 19th-century Cornish miners left Real del Monte its signature snack, and where to eat it now.

Here is the honest version. The paste (say it “PAHS-teh”) is a real import, not a marketing story bolted on later. In the 1820s a British firm, the Compañía de Aventureros de las Minas de Pachuca y Real del Monte, took over the flooded silver mines above Pachuca and shipped in Cornish miners to run the pumping engines. They came with their food, and the star of it was the Cornish pasty: a folded, rope-crimped pastry a man could hold with filthy hands and eat a thousand feet down a shaft. Two centuries later Real del Monte still runs on it. Yes, it is worth the trip up from Pachuca, and no, you do not need the museum ticket to get the point.

What a paste actually is

A half-moon of pastry, crimped along the curved edge into a thick rope seam, baked, and eaten warm. The seam is not decoration. In Cornwall it was the handle: you held the pasty by the crimp, ate the rest, and threw the crimp away because your hands were covered in arsenic-laced ore dust. Whether Real del Monte’s miners actually did that is folklore, but the crimp survived either way.

Start with the original filling. It is called paste de papa con carne: beef, diced potato, sometimes leek or poro, and a little chile or black pepper. That is the Cornish lineage more or less intact, and it is the honest baseline against which everything else is a variation.

Everything else is Mexican invention, and locals are relaxed about it. Nobody in Real del Monte guards an “authentic” line. You will see:

• Savory locals: mole verde, tinga de pollo, chicharrón prensado, rajas con queso, frijol.
• Sweet ones, a full row of them: piña (pineapple), arroz con leche (rice pudding), queso con zarzamora (cream cheese and blackberry), cajeta, manzana.

Order one savory papa con carne and one sweet, and you have eaten the entire two-hundred-year arc in about eight minutes.

Where to eat them in Real del Monte

The town is small, cold, and often socked in with fog, which is exactly the weather these were built for. The paste shops cluster along Calle Hidalgo and around the Plaza Principal near the parish church. A few things worth knowing:

• Prices are low and consistent, roughly 25 to 45 MXN each (approximate). Cheap enough to buy from two or three different shops and compare.
• Buy where the tray is moving. A paste that has sat under a heat lamp for an hour has gone leathery and greasy. Look for a steady line and a fresh batch coming out of the oven. If the shop is empty at 4 p.m., keep walking.
• The town leans into the story hard. There is a Museo del Paste and an annual Feria del Paste, usually held around October. Skippable if you just want to eat; genuinely useful if you want the mining backstory told properly. Do not build the day around it.
• Pachuca has its own pasterías too, including chains like Pastes Kikos, but the freshest and most varied are up the hill in Real del Monte itself.

What a friend who lives here would tell you: do not stop at the pastry. Walk fifteen minutes out to the Panteón Inglés, the English cemetery on the hill above town. Cornish miners are buried there with headstones deliberately facing northeast, toward home across the Atlantic, with one famous exception said to face Mexico. It is quiet, weathered, and usually free or a token fee. Standing among those Cornish surnames on a foggy afternoon is what makes the folded pastry in your hand suddenly make sense. This is the part most day-trippers skip, and it is the best twenty minutes of the trip.

While you are there, the old Mina de Acosta and the mining museum on the edge of town explain the pumping engines and the silver that paid for all of it. Real del Monte and neighbouring Mineral del Chico sit in the same silver belt that made Pachuca rich.

The wider Hidalgo loop

Real del Monte is about 30 to 40 minutes above Pachuca on the road toward Huasca. Pachuca is a straightforward drive from Mexico City, roughly 90 minutes to two hours depending on traffic out of the north of the city, and buses run frequently. ADO and its regional partner Futura run Mexico City (Terminal Norte and the airport) to Pachuca all day; from Pachuca’s central station, local colectivos and combis climb up to Real del Monte cheaply. If you are driving, the Mexico–Pachuca highway is fast and well maintained.

Once you are up the hill, string the paste run together with the rest of the mining country:

• Prismas Basálticos near Huasca de Ocampo: hexagonal basalt columns walling a small canyon, with a waterfall fed by the Presa San Antonio dam. Photogenic, a bit touristy, worth an hour.
• Huasca de Ocampo itself, Mexico’s first pueblo mágico, with slower streets, its own comfort food, and the old haciendas de beneficio where silver ore was processed.
• Mineral del Chico and its national park if you want pine forest and rock climbing instead of pastry.

Do it as a loop out of Pachuca and you get pastry, geology, and two hill towns in a single day. See more of the state from the Hidalgo hub.

Practical honest notes

• Bring a jacket, genuinely. Real del Monte sits above 2,700 metres. The fog is not atmosphere for your photos, it is the actual climate, and afternoons turn cold and damp fast even in summer.
• Go on a weekday if you can. Weekends bring chilango day-trippers up from the capital, and the plaza shops get a queue. The pastes are still good; you just wait longer.
• Cash is king in the small shops, though the busier pasterías near the plaza increasingly take cards.
• Two pastes is a meal, three if you skipped breakfast. Pair with a café de olla against the cold and you are set.

The paste trail is one of the few Mexican food stories where the origin is documented, the pastry is still cheap, and the place that invented the local version still makes it a short bus ride from Mexico City. Come hungry, come with a jacket, and give the cemetery its twenty minutes.