Museo Nacional

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The National Museum is in an unusual building known as El Panóptico. It was designed as the city prison by Thomas Reed (the same English architect who planned the Capitolio) and built of stone and brick on a Greek-cross floor plan in the second half of the 19th century. The jail, which housed more than 200 cells for both men and women, was closed in 1946 and after considerable internal reconstruction was transformed into a museum in 1948.