Museo del Dulce (Dulces Morelianos de la Calle Real)

The Museo del Dulce belongs to Dulces Morelianos de la Calle Real, a sweet maker that traces its origins to 1840, when a small workshop and shop called El Paraíso opened on what was then the Calle Real, today's Avenida Madero. The firm, which calls itself the oldest sweet company in Mexico, won an award in Paris in 1898, later moved into a colonial house on Madero Oriente, opposite the old Palacio Federal, and opened the museum there in 1999 to keep the city's sweet-making tradition alive and show it to visitors. Today it has five shops around Morelia, but the museum is only at this address in the historic centre.

The visit, guided and lasting about 40 minutes, runs through five rooms that tell the story of Michoacán sweets: the ingredients of pre-Hispanic cooking such as maize, cacao, seeds and fruit; the plants brought by the Spanish, above all sugar cane; the sweets made in colonial convents and monasteries; the recipes of Morelia families in their big houses; and finally the first factories. Staff wear Porfirian-era dress, there is a recreated traditional kitchen, and the museum keeps original machinery from 1960 that was used to cut and wrap ate, the firm fruit paste for which the city is best known. Visitors usually get to taste freshly made ate, and old carriages stand in the patio.

The tour ends in the shop, which sells more than 300 kinds of traditional sweets: ate, jellies, morelianas, cajeta, cocadas, jamoncillos, guava rolls, tamarind sweets, chongos, rompope and stone-ground chocolate, plus a café. It sits on Avenida Madero between the cathedral and the Fuente de las Tarascas, so it fits easily into a walk from the centre to the aqueduct.