7 Best Sights in Mexico City, Mexico

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.

Architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez's outstanding design provides the proper home for one of the finest archaeological collections in the world. Each salon on the museum's two floors displays artifacts from a particular geographic region or culture. The collection is so extensive that you could easily spend days here, and even that might be barely adequate.

The 12 ground-floor rooms treat pre-Hispanic cultures by region, in the Sala Teotihuacána, Sala Tolteca, Sala Oaxaca (Zapotec and Mixtec peoples), and so on. Objects both precious and pedestrian, including statuary, jewelry, weapons, figurines, and pottery, evoke the intriguing, complex, and frequently warring civilizations that peopled Mesoamerica for the 3,000 years preceding the Spanish invasion. Other highlights include a copy of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma's feathered headdress; a stela from Tula, near Mexico City; massive Olmec heads from Veracruz; and vivid reproductions of Mayan murals in a reconstructed temple. Be sure to see the magnificent reconstruction of the tomb of 7th-century Mayan ruler Pakal, which was discovered in the ruins of Palenque. The nine rooms on the upper floor contain faithful ethnographic displays of current indigenous peoples, using maps, photographs, household objects, folk art, clothing, and religious articles.

Explanatory labels have been updated throughout, some with English translations, and free tours are available at set times from Tuesday through Saturday.

Surrounded by a park with mature trees and greenery, cannons, and a towering statue of General Anaya, this fascinating museum in San Diego Churubusco—a pleasant 15-minute walk east of Coyoacán's historic center—may just be the city's best museum you've never heard of. It's devoted to relating the surprisingly lengthy and storied history of Mexico's wars, dating from the 1810–21 War of Independence to the Mexican Revolution a century later. The exceptionally well-executed exhibits within the building's many galleries provide an impressive explanation of how exactly Mexico became, well, Mexico. But you don't need to be a history buff to appreciate the building, which occupies the former Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Churubusco monastery, a glorious structure built in the late 1600s and converted into an ad-hoc military fort in 1847 during the Mexican-American War. In the exhibits, history is told through displays of uniforms, guns, flags, paintings, and other artifacts, including a diorama of the Battle of Churubusco and photos of Pershing's 1914 punitive expedition in search of the elusive Pancho Villa. The museum also contains a remarkable collection of original frescoes, religious paintings, and ex-votos from the building's period as a monastery. In addition, there's a tranquil community garden as well as galleries that host rotating shows. Part of the fun of touring the museum is observing the building's well-preserved sloping floors, beamed ceilings, fine tile work, and ancient arches.

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.

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.

Established in 1999 within the walls of a dramatic church that was part of a 17th-century monastery (most of which is now occupied by a military installation across the street), this free and rather underrated museum tells the story of Mexico's history, its formation into a republic, and even aspects of its demographics and economics (there are hydrography and mining maps, for example) through a series of maps and even more ancient codices that date back to the early days of New Spain. These documents cover the walls of the entire domed structure, and in the transept there's also a display of map-making equipment, from antique sextants to clunky GPS devices from the early 2000s. Signage is in both Spanish and English. Ironically (or perhaps as some sort of cosmic joke), using the map on your phone to get to this museum on the western edge of Tacabuya—just a 15-minute walk from Condesa—can be a bit tricky. The museum sits in the middle of a fenced-in island of sorts, surrounded by busy two-lane roads on all sides; to get in, go to the intersection of Anillo Periférico and Avenida Observatorio and go through the unmarked pedestrian underpass, which leads to a small plaza in front of the museum.

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.