Explore the real-world places that appear in Behind the Gate of Hours by Amparo Dávila, Matthew Gleeson & Audrey Harris. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Pinos, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí Historic Center, A Shuttered House at the Edge of Town, Mexico City — Colonia Roma, El Colegio de México and 8 more.
Amparo Dávila's birthplace — the Gothic origin of her imagination
Though not a literal setting in the stories, Dávila drew the bleak, semi-arid high desert of Zacatecas state into the marrow of her fiction. The claustrophobic small towns, stone houses with heavy doors and shuttered windows, and the ambient menace of rural isolation that pervade stories throughout this collection are rooted in her childhood here. The sense of being trapped in provincial life — suffocating and inescapable — is a theme that haunts nearly every narrator in the book.
Pinos is a silver-mining municipality in the southeastern corner of Zacatecas, one of Mexico's oldest colonial settlements, founded in the early 17th century. Its harsh climate, isolated geography, and long Catholic tradition gave it an air of severity that shaped many of its inhabitants deeply.
Pinos remains a small, quiet municipality known primarily to literary scholars as the birthplace of Amparo Dávila (1928–2020). The town's colonial architecture and stark landscape are little changed from her youth.
Visit: Municipio de Pinos (historic site)
Álvaro Obregón, Centro — formative city of Dávila's early life
Dávila spent her formative years in San Luis Potosí, and the city's imposing colonial plazas, dim convent walls, and severe ecclesiastical architecture breathe through her prose. The stone corridors and locked rooms that trap her protagonists echo the city's old palaces. The oppressive domestic interiors in stories like 'Behind the Gate of Hours' — where a woman is imprisoned by routine, dread, and an unseen force — feel geographically rooted in this city of heavy thresholds.
San Luis Potosí was founded in 1592 and grew rich on silver from nearby mines. Its baroque churches and colonial mansions made it one of colonial Mexico's wealthiest cities. The historic center is a UNESCO-recognized ensemble of pink quarrystone monuments.
The Centro Histórico of San Luis Potosí is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Visitors can explore the Plaza de Armas, the Catedral Metropolitana, and the Teatro de la Paz, which remain largely as Dávila would have known them.
Visit: Centro Histórico de San Luis Potosí (historic site)
Provincial Mexico — archetype of domestic entrapment in the stories
Dávila's stories return obsessively to a particular kind of house: stone-walled, heavy-doored, with a central patio that admits little light and windows that look inward rather than out. In multiple stories in this collection, female protagonists find themselves trapped in such structures — not always by lock and key, but by routine, fear, a husband's absence, or a presence that cannot be explained. The gate itself is a recurring image: a threshold that, once crossed, admits something that cannot be expelled.
The classic Mexican provincial house, built around a central courtyard, has its roots in Moorish and Spanish colonial architecture. In smaller cities like San Luis Potosí, these houses were simultaneously symbols of family respectability and instruments of women's enclosure.
Hundreds of such houses survive in the historic neighborhoods of San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, and Guanajuato. Many have been converted into boutique hotels or cultural centers, while others remain private residences.
Orizaba Ave, Roma Norte — literary bohemia where Dávila thrived
Dávila moved to Mexico City as a young woman and became embedded in the literary and intellectual life of the capital, where she was mentored by Alfonso Reyes. The urban alienation, the anonymity of apartment living, and the uncanny quality of strangers who may or may not be entirely human — all of which saturate this collection — draw on her life in Mexico City's old residential colonias. The houseguest who is never identified, the neighbor whose sounds seep through walls: these horrors are urban as much as rural.
Colonia Roma was developed in the early 20th century as an upper-middle-class residential area modeled on Parisian boulevards. By mid-century it had become a center of Mexican intellectual life, home to writers, artists, and publishers. It suffered major damage in the 1985 earthquake but was subsequently revitalized.
Colonia Roma is one of Mexico City's most fashionable neighborhoods, known for its art nouveau and neoclassical architecture, independent bookshops, cafés, and restaurants. It was the setting for Alfonso Cuarón's film Roma (2018).
Visit: Colonia Roma (landmark)
Camino al Ajusco 20, Pedregal de Santa Teresa — institutional world of Mexican letters
Dávila was connected to the literary establishment of mid-century Mexico through institutions like El Colegio de México, which housed archives and fostered the writers of her generation. The world of learned, patriarchal culture that both supported and constrained her — and that her fiction subtly demolishes through its images of domestic horror and female rebellion — was centered in institutions like this one. Her narrators' education and articulateness set them apart from, yet still trapped within, the systems that surround them.
El Colegio de México was founded in 1940 to shelter Spanish Republican intellectuals exiled after Franco's victory. It became one of Latin America's premier centers for the humanities and social sciences, closely associated with Mexico's literary golden age.
El Colegio de México remains an active research and graduate institution in southern Mexico City. Its library holds major archives of 20th-century Mexican literature and is open to accredited researchers.
Visit: El Colegio de México (library)
Interior hallway — the uncanny passage between safety and terror
One of the most repeated settings in Dávila's fiction is the corridor or passageway glimpsed at night — the long hall of a house where something waits at the far end, visible only in peripheral vision. In multiple stories in this collection, narrators wake in darkness and perceive something in the corridor that cannot be fully described: a shape, a sound, a presence. Dávila never explains whether these entities are supernatural or the products of the narrator's deteriorating mind. That ambiguity is the engine of her horror.
The corridor as site of dread is a staple of Gothic literature stretching from Ann Radcliffe's Italian castles to the hallways of Henry James's Bly. In Mexican Gothic tradition, the device is rooted in colonial architecture's deep interior spaces, which extended far from natural light.
This is an archetypal rather than specific location, representing the interior spaces of old Mexican houses throughout the country's historic cities. Many such houses survive in cities like Guanajuato, Oaxaca, and Puebla.
Mixcoac, Mexico City — the thin line between sanity and madness
Dávila's characters tread perpetually on the edge of institutionalization. Several stories in this collection climax with a character's collapse into what the surrounding society reads as madness — a collapse the reader is never entirely sure is not simply a more acute perception of reality. The specter of the psychiatric institution haunts her fiction: it represents the ultimate enforcement of social norms upon women and artists whose perceptions diverge from the accepted. La Castañeda was the real institution that loomed over the mid-century Mexican imagination.
Hospital La Castañeda opened in 1910 during Porfirio Díaz's presidency and was Mexico's first large-scale modern psychiatric hospital. It became a byword for abuse, overcrowding, and horror, and was demolished in 1968. Its legacy shaped Mexican cultural anxieties about madness for generations.
The original hospital complex was demolished and replaced by the Unidad Habitacional La Castañeda, a residential development in the Mixcoac neighborhood. The site preserves no original structures, but its cultural memory remains alive in Mexican literature and film.
Zacatecas — religion as weight, not comfort
Catholic iconography and the crushing weight of provincial religious life run through Dávila's stories as a persistent undertone. Her narrators are not sustained by faith; they are oppressed by its architecture, its rituals, and its insistence on submission. In several stories in this collection, churches appear as places of suffocation rather than sanctuary: their stone interiors are cold, their saints' eyes follow the protagonist, and their tolling bells mark the hours of an existence that cannot be escaped. Religion is another gate that locks from the outside.
Zacatecas's Cathedral Basílica de Zacatecas, completed in the 18th century, is considered the finest example of Mexican Churrigueresque baroque architecture. The region's intense Catholic culture was shaped by both the colonial mission system and the Cristero War of the 1920s.
The Catedral Basílica de Zacatecas remains a functioning cathedral and major tourist attraction at the heart of the city's UNESCO World Heritage historic zone. It draws visitors from across Mexico and internationally.
Visit: Catedral Basílica de Zacatecas (historic site)
Narrow alleyways, Guanajuato Centro — labyrinths of the Gothic Mexican imagination
Dávila's most suffocating stories are set in spaces that twist back on themselves, where escape seems possible but the routes keep narrowing. The famous underground tunnels and winding callejones of cities like Guanajuato are the closest real-world equivalent to the labyrinthine interiors of her fiction. A character in pursuit or flight — and Dávila's protagonists are often both simultaneously — finds that the path forward is indistinguishable from the path back. The city itself becomes a figure for the mind that cannot find its way out.
Guanajuato was built above a network of underground rivers and tunnels originally used for flood control and mining. The city's surface streets are notoriously winding and interconnected in ways that disorient newcomers. It is a UNESCO World Heritage City.
Guanajuato's historic center, including its famous tunnel road system and the narrow Callejón del Beso, is one of Mexico's most visited heritage destinations. The city also hosts the annual Festival Internacional Cervantino, a major arts event.
Visit: Guanajuato Historic Center (historic site)
Central Mexico — journeys that lead nowhere reassuring
Several of Dávila's stories hinge on arrivals and departures that promise escape but deliver only deeper entrapment. The train station in provincial Mexico — a cavernous, echoing building where passengers wait without certainty — is the setting for encounters between protagonists and figures who are strange, threatening, or inexplicable. The journey itself becomes uncanny: one arrives at a destination that is not what one expected, or does not arrive at all. Transit is never neutral in Dávila's world; it is always the moment when the uncanny intrudes.
San Luis Potosí's historic railway station was built during the Porfiriato era as part of the expansion of Mexico's national rail network. Rail travel was the primary means of long-distance movement in Mexico through the mid-20th century, when Dávila was writing.
The old San Luis Potosí train station building survives and has been repurposed. Passenger rail service in Mexico declined sharply after the privatization of Ferrocarriles Nacionales in the 1990s. The building is now used for cultural and civic events.
Visit: Antigua Estación de Ferrocarril de San Luis Potosí (historic site)
Coyoacán, Mexico City — surrealism as atmosphere and inheritance
Dávila has been compared to the great women surrealists of Mexico — Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Margo Glantz — and this collection makes those affinities vivid. The surrealist interior: the room where objects have subtly shifted, where a figure sits in a chair who was not there before, where the walls seem to breathe — this is the atmosphere of the book's most concentrated horror stories. Like Carrington and Varo, Dávila uses the domestic space as a site of psychic transformation and menace.
Coyoacán was home to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and became a gathering place for Mexican and exile surrealists in the 1930s–50s. Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo both lived and worked in Mexico City during this period, forming part of a vibrant community of surrealist women artists.
Coyoacán is one of Mexico City's most visited cultural neighborhoods. The Museo Frida Kahlo (La Casa Azul), the Museo León Trotsky, and the Museo de Arte Popular are all located there. The neighborhood's colonial streets and plazas remain largely intact.
Visit: Museo Frida Kahlo — Casa Azul (museum)
Archetype of Dávila's fiction — the space of maximum dread
The locked room is the central spatial obsession of this collection and of Dávila's fiction as a whole. It appears in variant forms: the room where a creature is kept that cannot be identified, the room the narrator is forbidden to enter, the room the narrator enters and cannot leave. In 'The Houseguest' and stories in this volume, the room represents the space of the unconscious, of suppressed desire and suppressed dread, made architectural and inescapable. To open the door is to destroy the last boundary between the narrator's self and whatever she most fears.
The locked room is one of Gothic literature's oldest devices, appearing in Bluebeard folk tales, in Ann Radcliffe, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and in countless Mexican and Latin American horror traditions. In colonial Mexican houses, locked rooms often contained family secrets, valuables, or the quarters of servants.
This is an archetypal location. Visitors interested in the architecture that inspired it can visit Casa de los Azulejos or the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City's historic center, which preserve original colonial and early-modern interior arrangements.
Av. Juárez s/n, Centro Histórico, Mexico City — the literary world Dávila inhabited
Dávila's stories were written in dialogue with the high literary culture of mid-century Mexico, a world whose institutional center was the Palacio de Bellas Artes. This collection's translators situate her work in relation to the broader Latin American fantastic tradition — Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo — all of whom passed through or were celebrated at Bellas Artes. Dávila's insistence on the surreal and the horrific rather than the realist and the political made her an outlier in this world, which is part of why her rediscovery has been so revelatory.
The Palacio de Bellas Artes was completed in 1934 after a 30-year construction period interrupted by the Mexican Revolution. It houses the national opera, the national theater, and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, and is decorated with murals by Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, and Tamayo.
The Palacio de Bellas Artes remains Mexico's premier cultural venue, hosting opera, ballet, symphony, and major art exhibitions. It is one of Mexico City's most iconic landmarks and is open to visitors daily.
Visit: Palacio de Bellas Artes (museum)
More by Amparo Dávila, Matthew Gleeson & Audrey Harris: All Amparo Dávila, Matthew Gleeson & Audrey Harris books