20 Best Nightlife in San Miguel de Allende and the Heartland, Mexico

Remember—whatever happens in La Mina Club stays more than 1,000 feet underground. This is the world's only nightclub in a mine. DJs spin modern dance music—don't expect salsa and merengue—while revelers admire the toxic waters deep below through glass floors. It's open Saturday night 10 pm–3 am, with a cover charge of MX$150. It's also open Thursday 4 to 10:30 (MX$50), and later on Friday night, although if its booked for a private party then, it won't be open to the public.

Don't miss the trendy Bar de Los Juaninos, in open air atop the Hotel de Los Juaninos, for the best view of Morelia's cathedral, and proper cocktails to complement it. The bar pushes champagne, too, and it has a great tequila and mezcal selection—even if it is a bit overpriced. It closes at 5 pm on Sunday.

A good plaza-side perch is Bar Luna, part of the hotel by the same name. It's open late into the evening. Indoors it's got cheeky design, and outdoors it's got a great crowd.

Centrally located Berlin is a pretty, popular, upscale bar with an international crowd. With German as well as international entrées, salads, and appetizers, the food is great, too; eat at the bar, the small restaurant in the back, or in the lounge under the exhuberant oil paintings of Peter Leventhal. Dinner is served until 11:30 pm.

Popular with locals (including families) as well as visitors, the "15 Letters" bar is small, lively, and fun. Drinks are a cut above the usual cantina fare, and the food is good, too. But a cantina it definitely is. On the walls are hundreds of works of art by Mexican artists, known and unknown. It has live norteño music most nights after 8 pm. It's just a few blocks southwest of the cathedral and Plaza de Armas, and open Monday through Saturday 1 pm to 2 am.

Students gather for drinks and salsa dancing (including classes) at Galería de Sabores.

A popular new restaurant and evening hangout at the restored Hacienda La Laborcilla delights patrons with a combination of Egyptian, African, and Moroccan-palace-chic in both indoor and garden settings. For tunes, listen to house, lounge, chill, and more danceable tunes. It's open from 6 pm to 3 am Monday through Saturday.

La Azotea, located on the roof of Pueblo Viejo restaurant, is a popular haunt for the well-heeled and well-dressed crowd, making for supreme people-watching as well as great sunset views. There's a bar menu, too, for nibbling a jicama taco, for example: breaded shrimp with chipotle mayo in a thinly sliced jicama wrap.

Calle Sopeña hops with nighttime activity, thanks in part to interesting spots like La Capellina: restaurant by day, bar by night, La Capellina does great drinks and hosts live music ranging from Latin jazz to blues.

Calle Sopeña is one of the hottest streets on weekend nights. La Dama de las Camelias, with its dingy-hip furnishings and longtime regulars, manages to stay unpretentious while pulling off its dive-bar-meets-vaudeville theme. You'll find everyone from twentysomethings to sixtysomethings hitting the dance floor for salsa and cumbia. It's open until 4 am.

Eight different mezcals, all from Oaxaca state, are used to create mixed drinks as well as shots to be savored. Try a cucumber-and-cilantro margarita, or one with red grapes, chilies, or ginger and mint. Many of the ingredients used in the indoor–outdoor bar's satisfying snacks—from sausages to bread and ice cream—are made by the owners themselves, a Swede and his Mexico City–born wife. The small but interesting menu meanders from oysters baked with spinach and Parmesan cheese to arugula salad, beef fillet on a coffee crust, and the Oaxacan specialty fried grasshoppers. Also available are Mexican wines and Dos Aves, San Miguel's artisanal beer.

Bar-restaurant La Oreja de Van Gogh has reasonably priced drinks and both indoor and outdoor seating. Although you can eat here, the restaurant is recommended primarily for drinks and for its location on cool Plazuela San Fernando. There's a larger branch at Plaza de la Unión with similar offerings, called simply Van Gogh.

Live salsa, cumbia, and other Latin tunes are played at La Porfiriana every night from 10:30 pm to 3 am.

Located in what was the oldest cantina in town, the small, often lively and crowded "Fat Mermaid" offers exotic drinks such as fresh ginger martinis starting at 1 pm. Enjoy yummy seafood tacos at tiny booths or on the equally diminutive open-air back patio.

Limerick is a big, boisterous Irish bar, complete with a dartboard and pool table, and attracts a young crowd.

One of San Miguel's original restaurant-bars geared to travelers looking for music, drinks, and dancing, Mama Mia still delivers. Within various salons a block from the main plaza—including a video bar, restaurant, and several other spaces—the bar hosts jazz, flamenco, rock, Latin (salsa), and classical guitar musicians throughout the week. There's karaoke, too, and soccer, American football, and other sporting events on a big-screen TV.

The hotel Quinta Real has one of Mexico's most unusual and romantic bars, a candlelit haunt literally built into the old bullring.

Within a transformed older house about four blocks from the main plaza, this chummy bar serves exotic margaritas with cucumber or chilies. You can also get a variety of small tapas plates, many featuring fresh seafood, if you want a nibble with your cocktail. Although each of its three contiguous rooms is smallish, the high ceilings make it quite acceptable to claustrophobes.

Recommended as much for its food as for the attractive bar-restaurant's decor and its huge menu of mezcals from Oaxaca, Michoacán, and Jalisco, as well as expansive wine list, Tata Mezcalería offers tasting menus and specialty appetizers featuring ingredients typical to Michoacán. Wednesday beginning at 8 pm, local musicians set up to entertain with different styles of music each week.

Although primarily a restaurant, Tío Lucas, across the street from the Angela Peralta Theater, offers live music nightly—jazz, blues, and salsa—and welcomes drinkers as well as diners to its intimate, upscale, rock-lined dining room.