Museo de la Ciudad, Baluarte de San Carlos

The city museum occupies the oldest bastion in Campeche's wall circuit and is devoted to explaining how and why the city came to be fortified, giving visitors historical context for the bastions and gates seen elsewhere in the Centro Historico. Its centrepiece is a large scale model reconstructing the complete 17th-century wall circuit with all eight bastions and both gates as originally built, allowing visitors to see the full defensive system as a single design rather than piecing it together from the surviving fragments around the modern city. Supporting displays include period weapons, ship models, historical maps and colonial documents, alongside exhibits on the pirate raids led by figures such as Diego el Mulato and Laurens de Graaf, the attacks that directly prompted the crown to fund the wall's construction. The museum also gives access to the bastion's vaulted underground chamber, part of the tunnel network that once linked several bastions, a feature that reinforces the defensive narrative told upstairs through documents and models. The curatorial approach is broadly chronological, moving from the pre-wall era of repeated raids through construction of the circuit to its eventual partial dismantling in the 19th and 20th centuries.