Archivo Histórico y Museo de Minería de Pachuca

The Historic Archive and Mining Museum fills a two-storey 19th-century neoclassical mansion at Calle Francisco Javier Mina 110, right in central Pachuca. The building first housed the offices of the San Rafael y Anexas miners' cooperative; later it was a teacher-training college and a secondary school for workers over 15, then passed to the Hidalgo state government and finally to the Real del Monte y Pachuca mining company, which donated it to the museum. Its quarry-stone walls enclose about 950 m² arranged around a central patio and two gardens, behind a symmetrical facade with wrought-iron grilles, balconies on corbels and fluted Doric pilasters at the corners.

Rescue of the mining company's papers began in 1981, the archive was formally set up in 1987 and the museum opened on 1 June 1993. A visit starts with a roughly 15-minute film in which miners describe their own work, moves into a geology room with 3D models, then climbs to the upper floor for pre-Hispanic metalworking, colonial-era mining and the English adventurers who arrived in 1824. The main gallery covers the American-run years, when the Pachuca–Real del Monte district became the world's top silver producer, and the later state-owned period, through tools, plans, photographs of men underground and original equipment. Out in the garden, an industrial-archaeology yard holds early 20th-century Mack trucks nicknamed cotorras ('parrots'), which hauled gold and silver bars to the railway wagons, plus an 80-tonne crane and a mine winch.

The archive keeps records from 1727 to 2002 in six collections: colonial (including papers on the 1766 miners' strike), 19th century, American, state-owned, subsidiary companies and graphic, the last with negatives, prints, maps, posters and video. It is regarded as Mexico's most complete specialised mining archive, with two reading rooms: the Juan Barrón library of about 7,200 volumes and the Ezequiel Ordóñez periodicals library of about 13,000. The same institution also runs the Acosta and La Dificultad mine site museums and an occupational-medicine museum in Real del Monte, so this mansion makes a good primer before you go down a real shaft.