The Guanajuato Mummy Museum, which sees more than 4,000 visitors a week, charges tourists £2 to gape³ at more than a hundred dried human cadavers⁴, all of which have been disinterred from graves in the cemetery⁵ next door.

 

Behind flimsy glass cabinets, the museum displays murder victims, criminals who were buried alive and infants laid to rest dressed up as saints – a Mexican belief that it will ease their passage to heaven.

 

'It's terrifying, I feel sick to my stomach,' Peruvian visitor Maria Goncalves told MailOnline in the middle of her group's guided tour. 'It's the terrible expressions the mummies all have that makes it so horrible.'

 

The Guanajuato Mummy Museum - owned by the state government - was recently voted as one of Mexico's best tourist attractions by users of one of Mexico's most popular tourism websites.

 

The mummies are a parchment-yellow colour, their dried skin moulding around the bones which lie beneath the surface.

 

The thinner areas of skin – such as the eyelids⁶, genitals, cheeks and earlobes – have deteriorated⁷ faster, and in most cases little remains⁸ but flaky scraps⁹ and gaping¹⁰ holes.

 

Despite the museum's macabre¹¹ exhibit, guided tour groups of 15 or more pass through its hallways every ten minutes.

 

'We see even more on weekends,' says Jose Martínez, who sells souvenir sugar effigies¹² of the dried human remains at the museum's exit. 'Usually on Saturdays there's an hour-long wait just to get in.'

 

The human remains have been preserved due to the method of burial in the Saint Paola Cemetery next door.

 

Corpses¹³, rather than being buried in the ground are sealed inside air-tight crypts, where the lack of oxygen slows the natural rate of decomposition¹⁴.

 

'The bodies dry out rather than putrefy, which leaves them in this state of mummification', says Jesús Saltillo, one of the tour guides at the museum.

 

Many of the corpses are so well preserved that their eyebrows¹⁵, beards and fingernails are still intact.

 

Nearly all of the mummies mouths are gaping open, a result of the hardening of the tongue and slackening of the jaw¹⁶ muscles following death.

 

'It leaves them all with an expression as if they were experiencing terrible pain,' says Jesús, 'but the vast majority died peacefully.'

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