Quinta Montes Molina

The Quinta Montes Molina is a house museum at Paseo de Montejo No. 469, between Calles 33 and 35, in the northern part of the avenue's original stretch. It was built in the first years of the 20th century (the museum gives both 1902 and 1906) as Villa Beatriz for Aurelio Portuondo y Barceló, a wealthy businessman from Havana, and was designed by the same architects who worked on Mérida's Teatro Peón Contreras. The style is eclectic with neoclassical finishes: a white two-story front with columns and a corner tower, set back behind an iron fence and a garden.

During the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution Portuondo left for Cuba in 1915, and the house passed to the banker and businessman Avelino Montes Linaje, who was married to María Molina, a daughter of governor Olegario Molina. Montes added terraces and bedrooms but kept the original structure. After his death in 1956 his daughter Josefina Montes Molina lived on in the house and changed very little until she died in 1983. It was declared a historic monument in 1982, and in April 2006 the family, with the state tourism ministry, opened it to visitors; it still belongs to Josefina's niece, María Eugenia Molina Montes.

What you see is a lived-in house of the Porfirian era rather than a reconstructed one. The central hall has three Baccarat crystal chandeliers, the piano room, library and dining room have Carrara marble floors, and the rooms keep their early-20th-century furniture, including upholstered chairs for winter and woven palm chairs for summer, along with Murano chandeliers, mirrors, clocks, Limoges china, Christofle silver and family portraits painted in Paris in 1899. A stained-glass sliding door leads to the garden, and the visit also takes in the basement. Since 2022 a cultural center designed by the architecture firm Materia has occupied the back of the property, with an art gallery in the garden and the Cafebrería Dos Encuentros café and bookshop.