Museo Regional de Tlaxcala

The Museo Regional de Tlaxcala fills the old cloister of the Franciscan convent of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, on the slope south-east of the capital's historic centre and beside today's cathedral. It is run by INAH and opened on 28 March 1981, turning 45 in 2026. The building is protected twice over: it lies within the Tlaxcala Historic Monuments Zone decreed in 1986, and since 2021 it has been World Heritage as part of the extension of the "Earliest 16th-century monasteries on the slopes of Popocatépetl".

The friars picked the site in 1528, beside the Chalchihuapan spring, the "place of the water of the green stones", where according to the chronicler Diego Muñoz Camargo Tlaxcalans brought newborns to be washed in a kind of baptism. The convent is usually dated to around 1540, though building went on until 1564, and the posa chapels at the corners of the atrium were finished in 1556. In 1537 the local people founded the Hospital de la Encarnación here, staffed by native doctors who healed with medicinal herbs. After its life as a convent the building served as a school for noblemen's sons, a military barracks and a prison before becoming a museum. A restoration in 2014 led to a reopening in 2015 with a new layout.

The permanent exhibition, Tlaxcala, tierra de encuentros, shows about 200 pieces in 13 rooms, from the first people and prehistoric fauna to the Revolution. There are pre-Hispanic ceremonial urns, a room on the Cacaxtla murals, another on Zultepec-Tecoaque and the border with the Mexica, and rooms on the alliance with the Spaniards, the conversion to Christianity and Tlaxcalan government. The San Antonio room holds large canvases about convent life. In 2026 the museum added an 1827 oil portrait of the crowned nun Manuela de Mesa and a tricolour flag carried by the revolutionary army of San Bernardino Contla. The collection runs to more than 3,500 objects, and about 25,000 people visit each year.

Beyond the rooms you can walk the upper and lower cloisters, with an octagonal fountain and a sundial, and see the Dr. Andrés Angulo Library, set in the former prison galleries, where fragments of mural painting from the 16th to the 19th centuries survive. Tactile stations serve visitors with visual impairments.