2 Best Sights in Alameda Central, Mexico City

If you fly into Mexico City at night, there's a good chance you'll spot the tower of this museum; located on the south side of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, its stoic modernist facade is clad in Moorish starbursts of red and purple neon. The museum hosts regularly rotating exhibitions of contemporary art, often experimental in nature, and a moving permanent memorial to the 1968 massacre that occurred on the plaza, installed in honor of that event's 50th anniversary.

The San Carlos collection occupies a handsome, 18th-century palace built by Manuel de Tolsá in the final years of Mexico's colonial period. Centered on an unusual oval courtyard, the neoclassical mansion became a cigarette factory in the mid-19th century, lending the colonia its current name of Tabacalera. In 1968, the building became a museum, housing a collection of some 2,000 works of European art, primarily paintings and prints, with a few examples of sculpture and decorative arts ranging in styles.