Museum sights in Mexico
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Museo del Ámbar de Chiapas
Chiapas amber – fossilized pine resin, around 30 million years old – is known for its clarity and diverse colors. Most is mined around Simojovel, north of San Cristóbal. The Museo del Ámbar de Chiapas explains all things amber (with information sheets in English and other languages) and displays and sells some exquisitely carved items and insect-embedded pieces.
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Museo de Cera
Most of the motley crew at the Museo de Cera look mildly constipated, but it’s fun anyway. Madonna appears to have had open-heart surgery, Michael Jackson looks creepy and John Lennon, yep, appears appropriately stoned.
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Museo de la Medicina Maya
The award-winning Museo de la Medicina Maya introduces the system of traditional medicine used by many indigenous people in the Chiapas highlands. It's a 15-minute walk north from Calle Real de Guadalupe or around $18 by taxi.
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Zoh-Laguna Museum
Zoh-Laguna's interesting history is illustrated photographically in the small Zoh-Laguna Museum, opposite Hotel Bosque Modelo.
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Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca
The beautiful monastery buildings adjoining the Iglesia de Santo Domingo house, the not-to-be-missed Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca. One of the best regional museums in Mexico, this takes you right through the history and cultures of Oaxaca state up to the present day. Explanatory material is in Spanish, but you can rent good audio guides in English for around $50. Also here is a good book and souvenir shop.
A gorgeous green-stone cloister serves as antechamber to the museum proper. The museum emphasizes the direct lineage between Oaxaca's pre-Hispanic and contemporary indigenous cultures, illustrating continuity in such areas as crafts, medicine, food, drink and music. …
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Teotihuacán
This fabulous archaeological zone lies in a mountain-ringed offshoot of the Valle de México. Site of the huge Pirámides del Sol y de la Luna (Pyramids of the Sun and Moon), Teotihuacán was Mexico's biggest ancient city and the capital of what was probably the country's largest pre-Hispanic empire. A day here can be awesome - don't let the hawkers get you down. Bring a hat, water and your walking shoes.
The site's main drag is the famous Avenue of the Dead, a monumental thoroughfare lined with the former palaces of Teotihuacán's elite. To its south is the pyramid-bedecked La Ciudadela, believed to have been the residence of the city's supreme ruler. Enclosed within the …
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Museo de la Caricatura
Mexico boasts a rich tradition of cartooning. Save for an eight-year period during the Porfirio Díaz regime when the dictator banned their publication, Mexican political cartoons have targeted the country’s leaders since the early 19th century. And as a glance at many daily newspapers shows, the art of scathingly political caricatures is very much alive and well. Housed in an 18th-century building that was originally an annex to the Jesuit college of San Ildefonso, the Museum of Cartooning displays the works of Mexico’s most prominent cartoonists from a collection of some 1500 original panels. These date from 1826, when Italian Claudio Linati published the country’s first…
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Ex-Convento de Churubusco
Scene of a historic military defeat, the 17th-century former Monastery of Churubusco, now a museum, stands within peaceful wooded grounds, 1.5km northeast of Plaza Hidalgo. On August 20, 1847, Mexican troops defended the monastery against US forces in a dispute over the US annexation of Texas. The Mexicans fought until they ran out of ammunition and were beaten only after hand-to-hand fighting. The US invasion was but one example in a long history of foreign intervention, as compellingly demonstrated by the National Interventions Museum inside the former convento. Displays include an American map showing operations in 1847, and material on the French occupation of the 186…
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Parque-Museo La Venta
This fascinating outdoor park-museum was created in 1958, and houses a zoo devoted to animals from Tabasco and nearby regions. You'll find cats including jaguars and ocelots as well as white-tailed deer, spider monkeys, crocodiles and more. There's an informative display on Olmec archaeology as you pass through to the sculpture trail, whose start is marked by a giant ceiba (the sacred tree of the Olmecs and Maya).
The 1km (0.6mi) walk is lined with archaeological finds from La Venta. Among the most impressive are Stele No. 3, which depicts a bearded man with a headdress; Altar No. 5, depicting a figure carrying a child; Monument 77, El Gobernante, a very sour-looking seat…
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Museo Frida Kahlo
Iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was born, lived and died in the ‘Blue House, ’ six blocks north of Plaza Hidalgo. Almost every visitor to Mexico City makes a pilgrimage here to gain a deeper understanding of the painter (and maybe to pick up a Frida handbag). Built by her father Guillermo three years before Frida’s birth, the house is littered with mementos and personal belongings that evoke her long, often tempestuous relationship with husband Diego Rivera and the leftist intellectual circle they often entertained here. Kitchen implements, jewelry, outfits, books and other objects from the artist’s everyday life are interspersed with art, photos and letters, as well as…
reviewed
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Alhóndiga de Granaditas
The site of the first major rebel victory in Mexico's War of Independence, Alhóndiga de Granaditas is now a history and art museum. Originally a massive grain-and-seed storehouse built between 1798 and 1808, the Alhóndiga became a fortress for Spanish troops and loyalist leaders in 1810. They barricaded themselves inside when 20,000 rebels led by Miguel Hidalgo attempted to take Guanajuato.
Just when it looked as though the outnumbered Spaniards would hold out, a young miner named Juan José de los Reyes Martínez (aka El Pípila), under orders from Hidalgo, tied a stone slab to his back and, protected from Spanish bullets, set the gates ablaze. The Spaniards choked on sm…
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Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño
Possibly the most important Diego Rivera collection of all belongs to the Olmedo Patiño museum, ensconced in a peaceful 17th-century hacienda 2km west of central Xochimilco.
Dolores Olmedo Patiño, who resided here until her death in 2002, was a socialite and a patron of Rivera. The museum's 144 Rivera works - including oils, watercolors and lithographs from various periods - are displayed alongside pre-Hispanic figurines and folk art. Another room is reserved for Frida Kahlo's paintings, including an especially anguished self-portrait depicting her spine as a stone column broken in several places. Outside the exhibit halls, you'll see xoloitzcuintles, a pre-Hispanic hai…
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Museo Nacional de Antropología
The National Museum of Anthropology, among the finest of its kind, stands in an extension of the Bosque de Chapultepec. The vast museum offers more than most people can absorb in a single visit. Concentrate on the regions you plan to visit or have visited, with a quick look at some of the other eye-catching exhibits. Everything is superbly displayed, with much explanatory text translated into English. Audio-guide devices, in English, are available at the entrance. The complex is the work of Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. Its long, rectangular courtyard is surrounded on three sides by two-story display halls. An immense umbrellalike stone fountain rises up from t…
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Museo de las Momias
The famous Museum of the Mummies at the panteón (cemetery) is a quintessential example of Mexico's obsession with death. Visitors from all over come to see scores of corpses disinterred from the public cemetery. The first remains were dug up in 1865, when it was necessary to remove some bodies from the cemetery to make room for more. What the authorities uncovered were not skeletons but flesh mummified with grotesque forms and facial expressions.
The mineral content of the soil and extremely dry atmosphere had combined to preserve the bodies in this unique way.
Today, more than 100 mummies are on display in the museum, including the first mummy to be discovered, the 'sma…
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Museo Nacional de Historia
A visible reminder of Mexico’s bygone aristocracy, the ‘castle’ that stands atop Chapultepec Hill was begun in 1785 but not completed until after independence, when it became the national military academy. When Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota arrived in 1864, they refurbished it as their residence. It then sheltered Mexico’s presidents until 1939 when President Lázaro Cárdenas converted it into the Museo Nacional de Historia. Historical exhibits chronicle the period from the rise of colonial Nueva España to the Mexican Revolution. In addition to displaying such iconic objects as the sword wielded by José María Morelos in the Siege of Cuautla and the Virgi…
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Museo Regional
The Museo Regional is beside the Templo de San Francisco. The ground floor holds interesting exhibits on pre-Hispanic Mexico, archaeological sites, Spanish occupation and the state's various indigenous groups.
Upstairs exhibits reveal Querétaro's role in the independence movement and post-independence history (plus religious paintings). The table at which the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848, ending the Mexican-American War, is on display, as is the desk of the tribunal that sentenced Emperor Maximilian to death.
The museum is housed in part of what was once a huge monastery and seminary. Begun in 1540, the seminary became the seat of the Franciscan province…
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Museo Sala De Arte Público David Alfaro Siqueiros
One of the Big Three of Mexican muralism along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros is recalled as much for his fiercely radical political views as for his larger-than-life paintings. An avowed anarchist, he notoriously organized an (unsuccessful) assassination attempt on the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Shortly before his death in 1974, Siqueiros donated his Polanco residence and studio to the government for use as a museum. Fans of the iconoclastic painter will find plenty of illuminating material about his life and work here, including sketches for his mural projects, and some of his paintings, notably an unfinished homage to Vietn…
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Museo Robert Brady
The one-time home of American artist and collector Robert Brady (1928–86), Museo Robert Brady is a wonderful place to spend time appreciating the exquisite taste of one man. Brady lived in Cuernavaca for 24 years after a spell in Venice, but his collections range from Papua New Guinea and India to Haiti and South America. Every room, including the two gorgeous bathrooms and kitchen, is bedecked in paintings, carvings, textiles, antiques and folk arts from all corners of the earth. Among the treasures are works by well-known Mexican artists, including Rivera, Tamayo, Kahlo and Covarrubias, as well as Brady’s own paintings (check out his spot-on portrait of his friend Pen…
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Fuerte de San Diego
This beautifully restored pentagonal fort was built in 1616. Its mission was to protect the Spanish naos (galleons) that conducted trade between the Philippines and Mexico from marauding Dutch and English buccaneers. It must have been effective because this trade route lasted until the early 19th century.
After a 1776 earthquake damaged most of Acapulco, the fort had to be rebuilt. It remains basically unchanged today, having been recently restored to top condition by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). The panoramic view of Acapulco you'll get from the fort is free and alone worth the trip.
The fort is now home to the Museo Histórico de Acapulco, w…
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Fuerte de San Diego
This beautifully restored pentagonal fort was built in 1616. Its mission was to protect the Spanish naos (galleons) that conducted trade between the Philippines and Mexico from marauding Dutch and English buccaneers. It must have been effective because this trade route lasted until the early 19th century.
After a 1776 earthquake damaged most of Acapulco, the fort had to be rebuilt. It remains basically unchanged today, having been recently restored to top condition by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). The panorama of Acapulco you'll get from the fort is free and alone worth the trip.
The fort is now home to the Museo Histórico de Acapulco, which h…
reviewed
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Museo Léon Trotsky
Having come second to Stalin in the power struggle in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled in 1929 and condemned to death in absentia. In 1937 he found refuge in Mexico. At first Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, lived in Frida Kahlo’s Blue House, but after falling out with Kahlo and Rivera they moved a few streets northeast, to Viena 45. The Trotsky home remains much as it was on the day when a Stalin agent, a Catalan named Ramón Mercader, finally caught up with the revolutionary and smashed an ice pick into his skull. Memorabilia and biographical notes are displayed in buildings off the patio, where a tomb engraved with a hammer and sickle contains the Trotskys’ ashes. T…
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Museo Regional de Guadalajara
This must-see museum has an eclectic collection covering the history and prehistory of western Mexico. Displays in the ground-floor natural history section include the skeleton of a woolly mammoth. The archaeological section has some well-preserved figurines, along with many fine artifacts of ceramic, silver, gold and other materials.
Upstairs are galleries of colonial paintings, a history gallery covering the area since the Spanish conquest, and an ethnography section with displays about indigenous life in Jalisco. The museum building, the former seminary of San José, is a late-17th-century baroque structure with two stories of arcades and several courtyards holding hidd…
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Palacio de Cortés
Cortés' imposing medieval-style fortress stands opposite the southeast end of the Plaza de Armas. Construction of this two-storey stone fortress-style palace was accomplished between 1522 and 1532, and was done on the base of the city pyramid that Cortés destroyed after taking Cuauhnáhuac, still visible from various points on the ground floor. Cortés resided here until he turned tail for Spain in 1541.
The palace remained with Cortés' family for most of the next century, but by the 18th century it was being used as a prison. During the Porfirio Díaz era it became government offices. Today the palace houses the excellent Museo Regional Cuauhnáhuac, with two floors of …
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Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera Y Frida Kahlo
If you saw the movie Frida, you’ll recognize the Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Studio Museum, 1km northwest of Plaza San Jacinto. Designed by their friend, the architect and painter Juan O’Gorman, the innovative abode was the home of the artistic couple from 1934 to 1940, with a separate house for each of them. Frida lived there for five years until she decided to divorce Diego for supposedly having an affair with her sister, and took her things over to the Casa Azul in Coyoacán. (They remarried soon afterward.) Rivera’s house preserves his upstairs studio, including Rivera’s collection of Judas effigies. Frida’s (the blue one) contains changing exhibits from the memorabilia…
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Museo de las Californias
The Museo de las Californias chronicles the history of Baja California from prehistoric times to the present. The exhibit kicks off with replica cave paintings, then covers important historical milestones, including the earliest Spanish expeditions under Hernán Cortés, the mission period, the Treaty of Hidalgo, the Chinese immigration, the irrigation of the Colorado River delta and the advent of the railroad. It's an excellent introduction to the peninsula and should not be missed.
Displays in glass cases mix with scale replicas of ships, missions, other objects and fairly realistic dioramas. All explanatory paneling is in English and Spanish, and touch-screen terminals…
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