Conservatorio de las Rosas and Templo de Santa Rosa

The Conservatorio de las Rosas occupies one of the oldest religious buildings in Morelia, two blocks northwest of the cathedral on Calle Santiago Tapia. It began as the convent of Santa Catalina de Siena, founded for Dominican nuns in the 1590s, and stayed so until the nuns moved to a larger convent in 1738; that procession is the subject of the famous 18th-century painting now in the Museo Regional Michoacano. In 1743 the building reopened as the Colegio de Santa Rosa María de Valladolid, a school for Spanish girls, many of them orphans, where music was a central part of the teaching. The college closed in 1870, and the building later served other uses, including a barracks.

Its life as a music school began in the 20th century. In 1914 the priest José María Villaseñor formed a boys' choir that became, in 1921, the Escuela Superior de Música Sagrada; the composer Miguel Bernal Jiménez, who had sung in it as a child, ran the school from 1933 for about twenty years. The Italian conductor Romano Picutti, a former director of the Vienna Boys' Choir, led the choir from 1949 to 1956 and renamed it the Niños Cantores de Morelia, which went on to tour the United States, Canada and Europe. In 1950 the civil association Conservatorio de las Rosas was founded and received the old Santa Rosa college on loan from the federal government. Because the college dates from 1743, the conservatory is often called the oldest in the Americas. The Morelia International Music Festival was born here in 1989, and the building is also home to the Orquesta de Cámara de Morelia.

Visitors can walk into the cloister, with its arcades, garden and old stone washing place. Next door, the Templo de Santa Rosa de Lima, the former convent church, has a plain stone exterior and a nave lined with gilded 18th-century baroque altarpieces. In front lies the Jardín de las Rosas, a small leafy square with cafés and outdoor tables that is one of the most pleasant places in the centre to stop.