Palacio de Cortés

The Palacio de Cortés, on the east side of Cuernavaca's historic centre, was built for Hernán Cortés as his family home and the seat of his Marquesado del Valle de Oaxaca; the first stage was finished in 1535. INAH counts it among the oldest civil buildings left from the years after the conquest. It stands on top of a tribute house used by the Tlahuica lords and then by the Aztecs, and remains of that older building can still be seen in front of the palace and in its inner courtyards, where excavations in the 1970s found Tlahuica material under the Aztec layers.

Cortés lived here with his second wife, Juana de Zúñiga, and their son Martín was born here. The family left it from 1629 to 1747, when it served as an ironworks, tannery and textile shop. Later it was a barracks and a jail, where José María Morelos was held during the War of Independence, and from 1872 it was the seat of the Morelos government for about a century. After restoration by INAH it opened as a museum on 2 February 1974. The 2017 earthquake damaged it badly; it reopened on 30 March 2023 as the Museo Regional de los Pueblos de Morelos, with its corner tower rebuilt in much lighter materials.

The ground-floor rooms follow Morelos from its first settlers through Chalcatzingo and the Olmecs, the Teotihuacan influence, Xochicalco, Tepoztlán and the Tlahuica domains to the conquest; upstairs come the encomienda, the Marquesado, trade with Asia, the convents, the textile mills, Independence, the Porfiriato and the Revolution. Newer rooms look at the state's biodiversity, landscapes and maize-growing towns. The highlight is on the east terrace: Diego Rivera's mural History of Morelos: Conquest and Revolution, painted between 1927 and 1930 at the request of US ambassador Dwight Morrow, with Zapata and Morelos among its figures. The entrance is from the Jardín Juárez.