Templo y exconvento de San Francisco de Pachuca

The church of San Francisco de Asís and its former convent make up one of the largest building complexes in central Pachuca. Friar Francisco de Torantos founded the Franciscan house in 1596, funded mostly by miners' alms, with 18,000 pesos for the church from Beatriz de Miranda. The first cloister was done by 1604 and the church around 1660. In 1732 the convent became a Propaganda Fide missionary college, and in 1771 silver magnate Pedro Romero de Terreros, Count of Regla, paid for a refectory, kitchen, infirmary, library, cells and orchards. The Reform Laws expelled the friars in 1860–1861, and the buildings went on to serve as a jail, barracks, civil hospital and mining school; in 1882 part of the old orchards became Parque Hidalgo. In January 1924 a dynamite bomb blew out the doors and organ and toppled a tower, which is why the tympanum carries both 1596 and 1924.

The church is Baroque with touches of Churrigueresque and Neoclassical, faces west and has a cross-shaped plan, groin vaults, four Neoclassical side altars, a wooden pulpit and a lantern-topped dome. The octagonal sacristy holds oil paintings of the life of St Francis, and in the transept lies the incorrupt body locals call Santa Columba, a catacomb saint given by Micaela Romero de Terreros. Alongside are the Third Order chapel, with an 1897 marble font and stained glass, and the chapel of Nuestra Señora de la Luz from around 1734. Each October the church anchors Pachuca's traditional San Francisco fair, which gets going around the 4th.

The old convent is now a cultural hub. INAH's Fototeca Nacional, the national photo archive set up in 1978 around the Casasola collection, holds some 900,000 pieces in 46 collections dating from 1847, and its photography museum shows them in five sections (portrait, testimony, daily life, landscape and visual essay), from the camera obscura to work by Hugo Brehme, Guillermo Kahlo and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Other cloisters hold the site museum, with about 50 mostly 18th-century pieces from the college years; the Antonio Peñafiel library; the Cuartel del Arte gallery, which has shown Rivera, Tamayo, Varo and Dalí; and the Centro de las Artes de Hidalgo, for dance, theatre, music, printmaking and writing, whose lobby has a 200 m² mural by Roberto Cueva del Río (1956–1957) on the state's history.