Museo Regional de Guadalajara

Lonely Planet review

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 hidden delights, some of which can only be viewed from above; be sure to wander everywhere.