2 Best Sights in Centro Histórico, Mexico City

One of Centro's most beautiful colonial palaces, built on land originally owned by Hernán Cortés's son Juan Gutiérrez de Altamirano, the Museo is both an excellent example of Mexico City's baronial 18th-century architecture and an interesting place for rotating exhibitions covering a wide range of subjects and interests. The original building was lost, with the current structure dating from 1778 when it was rebuilt as a palatial home for the counts of Santiago y Calimaya. By the early 20th century, the expansive structure had been broken into small, modest apartments, including one where the painter Joaquín Clausell (1866–1935) lived after arriving in Mexico City to study law. Claussel never finished his degree, instead going into exile due to his vocal opposition to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. While in Europe, he learned to paint and ended up becoming one of the most important Impressionist painters in Mexican history. The museum displays historical objects from Mexico City, including antique maps. Clausell's studio is also open to the public, and its walls are covered with his work. Keep an eye out for the stone serpent's head, likely pilfered from the nearby Templo Mayor, embedded in the building's foundations on the corner of Pino Suárez and El Salvador.

The ruins of the sacred shrine of the Mexica (also commonly known as the Aztec) empire, built here in the 14th century, were unearthed accidentally in 1978 by telephone repairmen and the vast, 3-acre archaeological site has since become the old city's most compelling museum. At this temple, whose two twin shrines were dedicated to the sun god Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tláloc, captives from the empire's near-constant wars of conquest were sacrificed in rituals commemorated in carvings of skulls visible deep in the temple compound. The adjacent Museo del Templo Mayor contains thousands of pieces unearthed from the site and others across central Mexico, including ceramic warriors, stone carvings and knives, skulls of sacrificial victims, models and scale reproductions, and a room on the Spaniards' destruction of Tenochtitlán. The centerpiece is an 8-ton disk unearthed at the Templo Mayor depicting the dismembered moon goddess Coyolxauhqui.

The proximity between Templo Mayor and Catedral Metropolitana is no coincidence. When the Spanish conquistadors defeated the Mexica empire, they intentionally destroyed their places of worship, and used the stones from the temples to build churches.