Stunning Antiquities and Frida Kahlo’s Home Are Just Some of the Offerings That Have Bolstered Mexico City’s Fantastic Array of Museums

The ancient capital has plenty of artwork and fossils, if that’s what you like. Or tour the writing rooms of a Nobel winner, the fortified home of an exiled Russian revolutionary and towers of skulls

September/October 2026

Anahuacalli Museum-Opener — Diego Rivera’s private collection of pre-Columbian art at the Anahuacalli Museum, which expanded and reopened in 2021. Alicia Vera

Nobody is entirely sure how many museums lie hidden in the sprawling megalopolis of Mexico City, but its government counts 171. They range from the high-profile National Museum of Anthropology, which holds the world’s largest collection of pre-Columbian items in a superb Modernist structure, to such extravagantly specialized destinations as the Tequila and Mezcal Museum, the Antique Toy Museum and the Mexican Sugar Art Museum. The controversial army-run Museum of Narcotics showcases exhibits related to the Mexican drug war, including golden revolvers and a stuffed drug-sniffing dog; travelers must write in advance seeking rarely granted permission to visit the edgy collection.

In between the grand institutions and the whimsical oddities are dozens of small, intimate spaces that offer rich experiences for visitors. Many are cultural leftovers from pockets of Mexico City’s long history, which dates back some 700 years. Others are more recently preserved homes of artists, writers and celebrities, repositories for the personal belongings of towering creative figures. In arm’s reach of family snapshots, a writer’s desk, a painter’s canvas, a hanging garment—even a cluttered kitchen sink—observers starkly realize that these figures were human, despite their legendary status.

A decorative piece of the facade of the *calmécac*, an ancient school for Aztec aristocrats. Alicia Vera

The cumulative effect of visiting such varied museums, I realized while spending time in recent years in CDMX (shorthand for Ciudad de México), is to flesh out an eccentric and immersive narrative of the city’s complex and multilayered history. And its repertoire is only increasing: In the past two years, several quirky and compelling museums have opened their doors here. Even residents can’t keep up. So last winter, I decided to explore Mexico City afresh through its newer museums (plus a few old favorites), to see what cultural wonders I might discover behind closed doors, fleeing the blizzards of New York for eternal spring.

Perched 7,350 feet above sea level and surrounded by volcanoes, Mexico City is bathed in sunshine for most of the year, with daytime temperatures that usually stay above the 60s. Its vast neighborhoods, home to some 22 million people, now claim the central Valley of Mexico, which was once an interlocking system of lakes and marshy islands that were ruled by the Aztec Empire.

The archaeological ruins of the calmécac were discovered during reconstruction efforts following an earthquake some 40 years ago. Alicia Vera

After the Spanish conquered the region in 1521, they set about draining the region’s waters and paving over its canals, so that today only one of the original lakes, Xochimilco, remains in the south. As a result, it can be difficult to picture the once-majestic Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, founded around 1325 on a central island with wooden pylons forming parts of its foundation. At its peak, in the early 1500s, the city was home to at least 150,000 inhabitants, and three causeways connected a central area full of pyramids, temples and ritual sites, known as the Sacred Precinct.

Conservation Champion — Raúl Barrera, director of the Urban Archaeology Program. “There was much more to Aztec culture than violence and human sacrifices,” he says. Alicia Vera

On a brilliantly sunny, cloudless morning, I headed over to the revered location, which now rests beneath Mexico City’s Historic Center, where the Spanish built their own colonial administrative heart as well as the ornate Metropolitan Cathedral, which still looms over the expansive Zócalo, or main plaza. “The vestiges of Tenochtitlan lie under our feet as we walk,” explained Raúl Barrera, who has been the director since 1991 of the Urban Archaeology Program (known by the Spanish acronym PAU), which oversees excavations in the historical center. “This is why we are slowly building a network of underground museums.”

After the Spanish conquest, Barrera explained, Hernán Cortés gave the Aztec capital a radical redesign to effectively erase the “barbaric” civilization, with its penchant for human sacrifices. But the idea that the city had vanished was overturned in 1978 when two electricians working near the Zócalo unearthed an eight-ton round stone carving of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui, prompting further excavations. Today, the base of the Templo Mayor, a step pyramid topped with altars to the Aztec gods of war and rain, is on exhibit inside an adjacent museum where the disc is displayed. And since 1991, PAU has excavated other “rescue sites” found during building construction in the Sacred Precinct, with the eventual aim of opening them to the public.

But to reach three of the most exciting discoveries, Barrera, a bearded, easygoing academic from Oaxaca, asked to meet on Guatemala Street near the Templo Mayor. We entered the modern Hotel Catedral, where desk staff waved as we took a seat in the foyer above the exposed circular foundations of the Temple of Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of the wind, which was unearthed in 2010 during construction of the hotel’s garage. A stairwell led down to the remains of an elegantly proportioned, rounded structure and part of a ball court dating from the 1400s, an area scheduled to open as a museum at the end of 2026. (When we visited, a young archaeologist was at work exposing the masonry with a brush.)

Excavation in Mexico City is difficult because moisture still seeps from the original clay lakebeds that Tenochtitlan was built upon. Barrera compared the soft, damp soil to a “giant jelly.” The compacting soil is also why many of the structures built since the Spanish arrival are “slowly sinking” at a rate of up to 20 inches a year, he added.

National Museum of Interventions, housed in a former monastery, chronicles Mexico’s turbulent history. Alicia Vera

Next, Barrera led me a few doors away to the Spanish Cultural Center, a regal 16th-century colonial structure with a basement containing the remains of a calmécac, which was a school for the sons of Aztec nobility. Discovered after a massive 1985 earthquake and open to the public as a museum since 2012, it houses eerily lit displays that include spiral roof decorations, well-used ceramic plates, an engraved human jaw used for religious rituals and spectral footprints embedded in stucco floors, as if the Aztec students had just vanished upstairs after classes. Each new site needs a creative engineering solution, Barrera observed, such as reinforcing colonial edifices or designing modern ones like the Hotel Catedral that “float” above Aztec ruins: “We no longer need to knock down buildings to excavate Tenochtitlan. The Aztec world can coexist with the modern.”

The highlight of the subterranean tour was nearby at a restored Spanish mansion that opened last year as (of all things) the Museum of Cacao & Chocolate. As a staff member at the ticket desk nibbled chocolate treats, Barrera peeled away the official PAU seal from an off-limits door to reveal a dusty chamber lit by bare bulbs. Barrera explained that workers had made a sensational discovery in the basement while the museum was being built in 2015: human skulls. Barrera soon realized that this was the famed Huey Tzompantli, where more than 650 craniums of sacrifice victims, ritually cleaned and stripped of flesh, were put on display as a centerpiece of the Sacred Precinct. “When the first skulls were found, we studied the memoirs of conquistadors,” Barrera said. “The soldier Andrés de Tapia left a detailed account of the Huey Tzompantli, describing a long rack with two hollow circular towers at either end. This was definitely it! It was a marvel.”

The subterranean chambers of the National Museum of the Revolution, where war relics are on exhibit in the “Popular Revolution” room. Alicia Vera

Barrera led me down a rickety ladder to examine the rows of hollow-eyed skulls embedded in an earthen wall. We then climbed down a second ladder inside one of the two hollow towers of skulls, row upon row gazing at us—an admittedly nightmarish and claustrophobic effect. As we sat in the haunted space, Barrera explained that the Huey Tzompantli remains an active archaeological dig, but there are plans to open it as a museum in the future. “Our first priority is conservation,” he said. It’s an important site of “huge cultural shock,” he added. One of Cortés’ men, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, described in his memoir witnessing human sacrifices at the top of the Templo Mayor.

According to Aztec theology, “the gods needed to feed on blood and human hearts every day,” Barrera said, explaining that the Aztecs believed they were blessed in return. “The sacrifices ensured that the sun rose every day and the crops grew. ... It wasn’t just a spectacle of death. It was a temple of life, a place of regeneration.” With that, we climbed back up to the Museum of Cacao & Chocolate, where the staff cheerfully offered us another plate of sweet treats, a surreal contrast to the darkness below.

For three centuries after the 1521 conquest, Spanish rule made Mexico City “the world’s first wholly multicultural place,” writes the historian Paul Gillingham in Mexico: A 500-Year History, with trade routes across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans establishing it as a “nexus for travelers, migrants and traders from the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe.” In the 19th century, after Mexico’s 1821 independence from Spain, French and American forces invaded the country in successive waves, a story recounted at the National Museum of Interventions. Situated since 1981 on a property studded with ancient trees in the dreamily quiet Churubusco monastery, from which resident monks were evicted in 1847 to turn it into a fort, the museum’s exterior is still dappled with bullet holes.

Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine September/October 2026 issue

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Battle Scene — Bullet holes from the Mexican-American War riddle the walls of the National Museum of Interventions. Alicia Vera

My saga continued at the National Museum of the Revolution, devoted to the uprisings that created Mexico’s modern constitutional republic between 1857 and 1920. Established in 1986 and recently renovated, it’s located beneath a cavernous structure first intended to be part of the Federal Legislative Palace. The labyrinthine space is filled with personal relics, photographs and artistic sculptures of sombrero-wearing rebel heroes, items that recount the stories of flamboyant, romantic figures like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, both of whom swept through the countryside with guerrilla armies. (Both were assassinated, Zapata in 1919, Villa in 1923.)

The revolution’s final success in 1920 led to a creative renaissance, as the government called on Mexican artists to help forge a new national identity based on pride in pre-Columbian civilizations and Indigenous cultures. The artistic pioneer was Diego Rivera, a charismatic figure who, in 1921, returned from a decade studying in Paris to throw himself into a state-funded mural program. His small army of fellow artists, including students and accomplished painters from around the country, elevated the art form and gave it a uniquely Mexican perspective. One of the best places to appreciate their contributions is the Living Museum of Muralism, which opened in 2024 in the former Secretariat of Public Education building, a majestic three-story open-air structure in a 16th-century convent in the Historic Center. Nearly 300 historic murals decorate the walls and arches around ornate courtyards, many by the wildly prolific Rivera, who was a committed Communist, showing Aztec warriors, laboring peasants and greedy capitalists. Murals by Mexico’s 21st-century practitioners are also exhibited.

The Plaza de la República boasts the Monument to the Revolution, above, the world’s tallest memorial arch at 220 feet. Alicia Vera

Even so, I found the most exciting “gallery” from the era a few blocks away in the now-run-down Presidente Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market, where murals from the 1930s cover the ceiling and walls. Having read about a second-floor vestibule, I asked a food vendor for directions. She pointed out a dark, unmarked stairwell that led up to a sunny chamber where, beginning in 1935, a 31-year-old Japanese American artist named Isamu Noguchi completed a vast artwork, History Mexico, over eight months. (Five years later, Noguchi would gain fame for News, a relief adorning Rockefeller Center in New York.) History Mexico, a 72-foot-long sculptural frieze made of concrete and black- and red-pigmented cement, depicts socialism’s battle with Nazism and capitalism with dynamic shapes of sickles, swastikas and human figures. Noguchi later wrote fondly of his Mexican sojourn, during which time he met (and had a brief affair with) the Surrealist artist Frida Kahlo, who was married to Rivera: Noguchi recalled “the affection that surrounded me, the life of Mexico, the songs of my love. Diego chased me twice with a gun, but fortunately did not shoot.”

By then, in the mid-1930s, multicultural Mexico City had cemented its reputation as an exile’s paradise, welcoming foreign artists, radicals and refugees. The city harbored German Jews and activists fleeing the Nazis, Italians fleeing Mussolini, Russians fleeing Stalin, and a veritable who’s who of Latin American revolutionaries. Many were followed by spies, assassins and secret police. In the leafy neighborhood of Coyoacán, history buffs can stroll to the Leon Trotsky House Museum, established in 1990 in a fortresslike mansion where the Russian revolutionary attempted to take refuge from Stalin and survived multiple assassination attempts before he was stabbed to death with an ice ax in 1940. The garden still has Trotsky’s chicken coops and rabbit hutches; a stone stele adorned with a hammer and sickle contain his and his wife’s ashes.

One of several dozen Diego Rivera works at the Living Museum of Muralism, *The Orgy—The Night of the Rich* portrays the debauchery of the wealthy even as soldiers from the impending revolution loom. Alicia Vera / © 2026 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, CDMX / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Leon Trotsky House, II — The office in the house where Trotsky was killed. Alicia Vera

A display in the Leon Trotsky House Museum features portraits of the Russian revolutionary from different stages of his life. Alicia Vera

Trotsky had fled to Mexico City in 1937, and he, too, had a brief affair with Kahlo, who, with Rivera, was a pillar of the left-wing arts community in Coyoacán, then a rustic village south of the city. The neighborhood today is part of the metropolis’s urban sprawl, but it maintains its old-world charm with colorful handicraft markets, verdant plazas lined by cafés and one of Latin America’s oldest churches, built atop an Aztec cemetery.

For decades, Coyoacán’s main attraction has been Casa Azul, the “Blue House,” where Kahlo was born in 1907, spent her childhood and later lived with Rivera. She died there in 1954. It is one of Mexico City’s most popular tourist sites, with ticket lines routinely stretching around the block, as befits the hometown star who today eclipses her husband: Kahlo’s distinctive image, wearing the traditional embroidered dress and floral headpiece of the Tehuana people of Oaxaca, adorns restaurants and souvenir stores. Exhibitions of her work tour the world’s marquee museums constantly, and in 2025 one self-portrait, The Dream (The Bed), broke the international public auction record for a female artist, selling for $54.7 million at Sotheby’s New York.

Did you know? Kahlo's legacy lives on

Likenesses of Frida Kahlo and husband Diego Rivera once graced the 500-peso note.
Salma Hayek earned an Oscar nomination for her starring role in the 2002 film, Frida.
The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art holds several photographs of Kahlo and letters she wrote to Rivera and others.
Bronze statues of Kahlo and Rivera were installed at the Frida Kahlo Park in Mexico City in 1984.

Home, Sweet Home — The kitchen at the Kahlo House Museum, also known as the Casa Roja, is where Frida Kahlo’s family resided as recently as three years ago. The new museum offers an intimate look at the artist’s everyday surroundings, including dishes, and letters. Alicia Vera

As a result, the opening late last year of the new Kahlo House Museum, also in Coyoacán, was a major cultural event. Known as Casa Roja, the “Red House,” the memorabilia-filled museum epitomizes the capital’s penchant for domestic shrines to historical celebrities, Adán García Fajardo, the museum director, told me. “We Mexicans like heroes. We like warriors. We like sorcerers. We like magic that moves us and great personalities.”

Kahlo qualifies in each of these categories, and her paintings have deeply affected millions. Her art is inseparable from her operatic life story, which was marked by a life-altering accident, a severe illness, a traumatic relationship with Rivera and several tumultuous love affairs. With a focus on her early biography, Casa Roja serves as a complement to Casa Azul. “The Red House is like a prequel to the Blue House,” said María José Camacho, a staff member. “We look at Frida as a person, not just as an artist or Diego’s wife. It completes her story.”

Kahlo’s parents moved into the Red House (so named because it had a red door, although its entire exterior has now been painted red) in 1931, and Cristina, Kahlo’s younger sister, moved in a few years later with her two children, Isolda and Antonio. “Frida spent the night here whenever she was fighting with Diego, or when she wanted moments of privacy or intimacy,” García Fajardo said, including an 18-month stretch in 1947-48. “It’s believed she came here for romantic trysts with Leon Trotsky and Noguchi.”

What also distinguishes the Red House, Camacho added, is that it remained a family home until recently. Cristina’s grandchildren lived there until a few years ago, leaving it filled with private relics that survived through the generations. “The family passed on the archives and artifacts from daughter to daughter to daughter in a chain. The descendants were still living here just three years ago. This is where they had dinners, entertained guests, celebrated birthdays. It was the family’s heart,” said Camacho. Curators have cataloged clothes, jewelry, toys, medicines, wedding invitations and scribbled notes from Kahlo.

This wealth of memorabilia is essential to the allure of all house-museums, García Fajardo said: “People can tell when something is not an original; you can almost feel it. We were able to salvage the personal treasures from inside the house. The sheets on the beds are original. The cutlery in the kitchen is original. We even have a pack of Frida’s cigarettes.”

Casa Roja still feels like a family affair. One of Kahlo’s great-great-nieces, Mara de Anda Romeo, narrates the introductory video, which relates Kahlo’s childhood, the case of polio at age 6 that left her with a withered leg, and the horrific bus accident that damaged her spine at 18. (The narrations also refer to her distinctive uniceja, her unibrow.) Elsewhere in the museum, another great-great-niece, Frida Hentschel Romeo, gives voice to Kahlo’s sister Cristina. Many exhibits recount Kahlo’s growth as an artist, starting with her close relationship with her father, Guillermo, a Hungarian German immigrant and photographer who produced many striking family portraits, including childhood shots of Kahlo. “Frida’s father was very artistic,” said García Fajardo. “He wanted to be a painter and loved opera and music—all passions that he passed on to Frida.”

During renovations, the interior courtyard was paved for visitor access, and the original grapefruit tree was replaced. (The family had loved the citrus perfume suffusing the house.) Images of grapefruit leaves also adorn the cozy kitchen above a mural of fluttering birds discovered beneath a layer of white paint, possibly done by Kahlo herself. An inscription reads, “El mesón de los gorriones,” “The Sparrows’ Inn.” It’s easy to imagine the family gathering around the table.

Perhaps the most striking space is downstairs, where a small easel stands on a desk in a bare-brick room surrounded by dolls Kahlo shipped home from San Francisco’s Chinatown around 1930 because, Camacho told me, she wrote to her sister that they reminded her of Mexico. Standing there, I felt a satisfying intimacy from encountering the everyday lives of larger-than-life figures, which both demystifies them and makes us appreciate their extraordinary achievements all the more.

I had a similar experience in the former home of an acquaintance of Kahlo’s, the prolific English-born painter, sculptor and novelist Leonora Carrington. One of a coterie of Surrealist artists who fled Europe for Mexico, Carrington produced nearly a dozen books and more than 2,000 visual works during a long and colorful life—mysterious creations, often hybrid humans and animals, that were once said by contemporary admirer Edward James to have “materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight.”

Carrington’s journey to Mexico reads like an adventure novel. In the 1930s, she turned her back on the aristocratic comfort of a conservative Catholic upbringing in Lancashire to study art in Florence and live as a bohemian in Paris, where she became romantically involved with Max Ernst, the German-born pioneer of Dadaism and Surrealism. She narrowly escaped the Nazi invasion in 1940, fleeing to Spain, where she strategically married a Mexican diplomat, then traveled underground to Portugal and New York, eventually finding refuge in Mexico City in 1942. In 1948, Carrington moved into a house in the Roma neighborhood with her new husband, a Hungarian-born photographer, and she remained there for 20 years before moving to the United States. In her last decades, she returned to the Mexico City house to live and work. (Today, the district is filled with CDMX’s trendiest cafés, bars and restaurants, but a sense of its quiet charm a few decades ago can be gained from Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning 2018 film, Roma.)

Once obscure, Carrington’s artistic reputation has soared since her death in 2011, at age 94. Plans to open her three-story, Bauhaus-inspired abode on Chihuahua Street as a public museum faltered in 2024, but it is now preserved by the Metropolitan Autonomous University as a research center, the Leonora Carrington House Studio. True devotees can visit by appointment (and by paying a hefty $100 fee). The homey, lived-in rooms have hardly been touched since Carrington died, and they are adorned with original bronze sculptures, creating a mythical bestiary: cats with human faces, a life-size horse with the head of a crescent moon, a crocodile with baby crocodiles riding on its back (a larger version of which can be seen a few blocks away on Insurgentes Avenue). The most intimate space, once again, is the kitchen, with spices still in their racks, a half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray, snapshots stuck casually to the cupboard doors and a dark sculpture of a fantastical beast hunched by the sink.

Mexico City reveres its writers as much as its visual artists. One of the newest and most intriguing literary shrines is the stylish home of Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian-born winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The home lies in the affluent southern neighborhood of Jardines del Pedregal (“stone gardens”), where he lived with his family for 39 years, until his death in 2014 at age 87. Gabo, as he is fondly referred to by relatives and fans alike, was by then one of Latin America’s most beloved writers thanks to One Hundred Years of Solitude, the masterwork he wrote in Mexico City in the mid-1960s, and his house on Calle Fuego (“Fire Street”) quickly became a crossroads of the capital’s intellectual life. It was formally opened by the family in 2025 as the Casa de la Literatura Gabriel García Márquez and can be visited by appointment.

“I like to do the house tours myself, although I never say who I am,” said Emilia García Elizondo, García Márquez’s 36-year-old granddaughter. “I can offer little insights about Gabo because I’m part of the family. For example, my grandfather only ever sat in this chair,” she said, indicating a comfortable-looking white padded recliner. We wandered the cozy living room, which was adorned with oil portraits and bronze busts of García Márquez and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, by artist friends. “After my grandmother died in 2020, we didn’t want to sell the family home. It was so full of memories. It was hard for us to let go, but we had no long-term plan.” They sold García Márquez’s clothes and donated the money to a children’s charity in the Mexican state of Chiapas, then staged small exhibitions before deciding to officially open.

I crossed the manicured garden to the separate study-library to meet one of García Márquez’s sons, 64-year-old Gonzalo García Barcha, a mustachioed graphic designer who recalled that his parents loved to entertain celebrated writers, politicians and movie stars in the house. “I remember when Fidel came here,” he mused. “Sean Penn came by with Hollywood people wanting to do a film of The Autumn of the Patriarch,” García Márquez’s 1975 novel about a declining dictator.

García Barcha said that the family envisions the house as a venue for lectures, talks and book club meetings: “There is a very different atmosphere here than in a curated museum. This is where my parents lived for decades. This is where they died. These are Gabo’s books, his office. It was a workplace.” The casual presence of literary artifacts was thrilling: The library has the narrow wooden table on which García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude (the original manuscript is in the Soumaya Museum across town), while the study has the larger desk on which he wrote Love in the Time of Cholera. One wall features a photo portrait of García Márquez by Richard Avedon. Other snapshots show him in 1982, accepting his Nobel in Stockholm, and in the company of American presidents.

Although raised on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, García Márquez became in his mature years a wildly popular adopted son in literature-loving Mexico City. “Taxi drivers knew his address,” said García Barcha. “When he died, the street was so crowded with people that friends couldn’t get in for a week.”

The final artistic genius I pursued worked in a very different discipline: architecture. Luis Barragán, who emerged in the mid-20th century as the most influential designer in Latin America, has long been a household name in Mexico City for his unique creations, mixing minimalism and bold colors that evoke a technicolor version of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although he was personally austere, even monklike in his habits, he is responsible for the city’s passion for pink, for example, which is now the color of choice for taxis, metro stations and many houses, the product of his love for the bougainvillea flowers of his home state of Jalisco. Traveling art aficionados now seek his work all over CDMX. Frustratingly, all but one of his masterpieces are privately owned, with byzantine booking rules and eccentric hours.

Serene Scene — A bright pink wall and reflecting pool at La Cuadra San Cristóbal, a former horse ranch built in the late 1960s and reopened as a museum in 2025. Alicia Vera

So it was welcome news in 2025 when La Cuadra San Cristóbal, a majestic 6.7 acre former horse ranch designed by Barragán in the mid-1960s and located far north of the city, was opened to the public. It had been purchased in 2024 by the Fernando Romero Foundation, which is led by the accomplished Mexico City architect Fernando Romero. (His own masterwork is the iconic Soumaya Museum, unveiled in 2011 as a swirl of silver tiles rising like a meringue cake.) In an hourlong taxi ride to La Cuadra, I passed Barragán’s imposing Satellite Towers, five concrete obelisks painted in bold primary colors—blue, two white, yellow and red—soaring between 98 and 171 feet above a busy highway. From a narrow back road, I entered the former horse ranch, which, like all of Barragán’s sites, is an enclave of serenity blending art and nature, and joined some 100 guests exploring the monumental structures. The geometric pink and white walls interspersed with brilliant blue pools, lush green trees and hypnotic fountains evoke a kaleidoscopic Stonehenge. Within the so-called Secret Garden, Barragán had tied the branches of saplings together so they would grow into tunnels of vegetation; today, they are succulent hideaways worthy of an elven forest.

Romero himself led visitors through La Cuadra’s new highlight, a museum exhibition devoted to Barragán’s work using his own words (“Barragán on Barragán”) accompanied by detailed scale models of each of his creations. The most idiosyncratic of the sites in Mexico City, Romero explained, is also the most eccentric to visit today: the Capuchin Convent Chapel, designed and built by the devoutly Catholic Barragán from 1955 to 1963. The chapel is still part of a functioning nun’s residence. Appointments are limited and can be booked only by telephone. Indeed, the first three times I called, nobody picked up. Finally, an elderly nun answered, but she said she couldn’t find the appointment register—another nun had misplaced it. Could I call back? Securing a slot took three more attempts.

Casa de la Literatura — Natural light fills Gabriel García Márquez's studio. Alicia Vera

The challenge only added to the anticipation when I finally stood at 10:30 a.m. on a quiet street in a far southern neighborhood called Tlalpan, ringing the bell at an unmarked wooden portal. Eventually it creaked open, and an octogenarian nun in a black habit peered out at me suspiciously. “You’re a half-hour late,” she chided, before reluctantly letting me in. She was carrying a wicker tray, where I was to leave my phone (no photos!) and 200 pesos ($11) in cash. (No credit card capabilities, she told me with a chuckle.)

Even by Mexico City’s standards, the convent had an otherworldly air. After introducing herself as Sister María de los Dolores, the nun led me into a compact interior courtyard where a glassy pool reflected a canary-yellow lattice framed by vines. Inside the silent chapel itself, a beam of golden morning sunshine magically lit up the gilded altar, while a minimalist cross cast its shadow on a glowing orange wall. “Barragán played a game with light,” Sister María de los Dolores said simply. The chapel’s elegant pine decor was unchanged from its 1963 appearance except for a mirror hung in the robe room. “The mother superior wanted to see how she looked when she got dressed,” the sister said with a wry laugh.

Sister María de los Dolores, one of only 11 elderly nuns who live in the convent, recalled that she had met Barragán many times when he came to services here until his death in 1988. “He was very religious and very generous,” she said. “We couldn’t afford a new chapel, so he paid for most of it himself.” Still, she confided, it was not a seamless process: Construction was delayed for two years because of an artistic disagreement between Barragán and the mother superior. “She wanted an arched roof, but he wouldn’t change his design,” according to her story. “Then after she died, the next mother superior said, ‘Let’s finish what we started as soon as we can!’ And they proceeded with Barragán’s plan.”

At the Casa de la Literatura Gabriel García Márquez, the author appears in photographs with his family and with luminaries such as Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan and Barack Obama. Alicia Vera

We ended up back at a desk where the nuns had set up a modest stall selling cookies, honey, eggnog, postcards and souvenir books—cash only.

On my way back to the city center, I detoured to a final museum where the artistic strands of Mexico City converged: a fantastical edifice called the Anahuacalli Museum (“ana-wa-KAH-li”), designed by Rivera in the 1940s to display his private collection of pre-Columbian art. It was a culmination of his lifelong championing of Mexico’s artistic heritage: Rivera had acquired his first Mexican antiquity at age 10 in 1896, when he visited a flea market with his father, and 30 years later he had 60,000 pieces that needed a home. Both he and Kahlo saw Anahuacalli’s first stone laid in the early 1940s, but neither lived to see it open in 1964. Their passion for ancient art has spread in the decades since in Mexico City and beyond: In 2021, a renovation and expansion of Anahuacalli was completed, resulting in a renewed burst of fascination.

Today, it qualifies as one of the world’s oddest yet most engaging museums and an immersive aesthetic experience. Looming above a grand courtyard modeled on an Aztec ball court, its main structure is a hybrid pyramid and temple made from dark volcanic rock. The first floor represents the Aztec underworld, as I learned after stepping through a portal from blinding sunshine into near darkness. In cavernous, sepulchral galleries, exquisite stone statuettes are hauntingly spotlit on shelves without any labels, adding to the sense of mystery and wonder, while Rivera’s ceiling mosaics emphasize the feathered Aztec serpent-god Quetzalcoatl. A carved staircase rises through trapezoidal arches to upper galleries filled with streaming light. A wall in the largest chamber has a giant unfinished mural by Rivera that depicts Kahlo giving art lessons to Indigenous farmers. For a moment, the seven centuries of Mexico City’s extravagant history blurred.

Afterward, it was a struggle to hail a taxi on the narrow street outside the museum, then nudge back through the city’s notorious peak-hour traffic to the center. I gazed out at the apparently endless 21st-century megalopolis and knew I had only just scratched the surface.

Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times and WSJ Magazine, and the author of six books including ¡Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel and the Improbable Revolution that Changed World History,The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games and Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped. Follow him on Instagram @TonyPerrottet.

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Stunning Antiquities and Frida Kahlo’s Home Are Just Some of the Offerings That Have Bolstered Mexico City’s Fantastic Array of Museums

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