Museo Robert Brady

Next to Cuernavaca cathedral, on Calle Nezahualcóyotl, the Casa de la Torre began as part of the town's 16th-century Franciscan convent; the tower that names it was added in the early 1900s and served as an observatory. Robert Brady, a painter from Fort Dodge, Iowa, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Barnes Foundation, came to Mexico in 1959, settled in Cuernavaca and bought the house in the early 1960s to restore it as his home.

He painted for nine months a year and travelled for three, and those trips built the collection: African masks, pre-Hispanic figures, Guerrero ceramics, wooden crucifixes, Javanese puppets and pieces from Oceania, India and East Asia, hung among Mexican paintings. Highlights include Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Monkey (1945) and works by Rufino Tamayo, Miguel Covarrubias, Francisco Toledo and Roberto Montenegro, while lithographs by Diego Rivera, José Guadalupe Posada and Max Beckmann turned up in the print room after his death. Guests over the years included Peggy Guggenheim, Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz.

Brady died of cancer in 1986 and is buried in the garden. As he wished, the house became a museum, opening on 18 February 1990 with help from INAH and the Robert Brady foundations in Mexico and the United States. Nothing was rearranged into gallery order: about 1,300 objects still fill 14 rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen and dining room included, painted in strong colours that owe something to Luis Barragán, such as the Yellow Room and the Oriental Bedroom. There is a café in the main courtyard, and the museum runs talks and art history courses.