Ex Convento de Acolman

On the way between Mexico City and the pyramids, the town of Acolman is home to one of the best-preserved monasteries of early colonial Mexico. Work began in the 1520s under the Franciscans, and the Augustinians, who took it over in the 1530s, finished it at its present size around 1560, a date recorded on the facade. That facade is the highlight: a carved Plateresque doorway with slender columns and Renaissance ornament that looks surprisingly delicate on such a fortress-like church.

The monastery had a hard history with water. Floods repeatedly swept the lowlands here, and after a severe one in the 18th century the friars left for good, with mud filling the church and lower cloister. It was rescued in the early 20th century, opened as a museum in the 1920s and declared a historic monument in 1933. You enter today down a ramp, a reminder of how much silt had to be cleared.

Inside, INAH runs the Museo Virreinal de Acolman in the cloisters, with religious paintings and sculpture and 16th-century murals. Acolman also claims a role in the origin of the Christmas posadas, and every December it holds a piñata fair that fills the town.