Museo Nacional de Antropología

The Museo Nacional de Antropología is the single most important museum in Mexico and the place to start if you want to understand the country before you travel further. The building opened in 1964 to a design by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, working with Jorge Campuzano and Rafael Mijares, and it was put up in roughly nineteen months. Its collections are far older: they descend from the national museum that was divided in 1906, and today they run to around 600,000 objects. In 2024 the museum counted about 3.7 million visitors.

The layout is easy to follow. Two floors of galleries wrap around a central courtyard, which is covered in part by "el paraguas", a vast umbrella-like roof held up by a single slender column, with a pool in the courtyard recalling the Aztecs' lake origins. The ground floor is arranged by region and culture: Teotihuacan, the Toltecs, Oaxaca, the Gulf Coast, the Maya, the north and west. The Mexica Room, devoted to the Aztecs, is the largest hall and the centrepiece of the museum. The museum's best-known pieces include the Sun Stone and the great statue of Coatlicue. Upstairs, the ethnography galleries look at the Indigenous peoples of Mexico since the Spanish conquest, and they are worth leaving time for.

Look out for the replica of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent from Teotihuacan, a useful preview if you plan a day trip to the pyramids, and the Huastec statue known as the Señora de Amajac, found in a citrus grove in 2021. The gardens around the building hold outdoor pieces, and the museum also houses the national library of anthropology and history, with codices, maps and colonial manuscripts.

This is not a museum to rush. Allow at least three hours, and a full day if you want to see both floors properly. A sensible plan is to pick four or five halls on the ground floor, starting with the Mexica Room, and then decide whether you have energy for the upper floor. INAH lists the museum as closed on Mondays and open from 9:00 to 18:00 the rest of the week, and temporary exhibitions change through the year, so check what is on before you go.

The museum stands on Paseo de la Reforma at the corner of Calzada Gandhi, in the Chapultepec Polanco area. Auditorio station on Metro Line 7 is the closest, and the forest's own website also suggests Chapultepec station. Chapultepec Castle and the National Museum of History are in the same section of the forest, so it is easy to combine the two on one long day.