Museo Nacional de Antropología

The Museo Nacional de Antropología holds Mexico's most important archaeological collection, covering every culture of ancient Mesoamerica, and with about 3.7 million visitors in 2024 it is the most visited museum in the country. It stands in the first section of the Bosque de Chapultepec, on Paseo de la Reforma at the corner of Calzada Gandhi. President Adolfo López Mateos opened it on 17 September 1964, after a building campaign of only 19 months led by the architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez with Rafael Mijares and Jorge Campuzano. A colossal stone figure of the rain god from Teotihuacan, brought from near Coatlinchan in the State of Mexico, greets visitors at the Reforma entrance.

The building is a masterpiece of Mexican modern architecture in its own right. Its halls wrap around a long courtyard, and over part of it floats El Paraguas, the umbrella: a concrete roof of about 84 by 54 meters resting on a single column, clad in bronze reliefs designed by José Chávez Morado, with water falling from its rim in a ring. The ground floor runs through ancient Mexico hall by hall and region by region, from Teotihuacan and the Mexica to Oaxaca, the Gulf Coast and the Maya. The upper floor covers the Indigenous peoples of Mexico today, with 11 ethnography halls that have been renewed since 2020 and reopened in 2024 and 2025 with about 6,000 objects, from textiles to festival masks.

The Mexica hall at the end of the courtyard is the heart of the museum. Here are the Piedra del Sol, the huge carved disc often called the Aztec calendar, the goddess Coatlicue and the Stone of Tízoc. Elsewhere you can see the Olmec colossal heads, the flower prince Xochipilli, offerings pulled from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá, a replica of the carved lid of King Pakal's tomb at Palenque and a copy of the feather headdress attributed to Moctezuma. The museum also houses the national library of anthropology and history. It made headlines on Christmas Day 1985, when two veterinary students stole 124 pieces; most were found in 1989. One visit is rarely enough to see it all, so many people pick a few halls and come back.