Museo Casa Redonda (Historic Railway Roundhouse)

Museo Casa Redonda occupies a former railway roundhouse built in the early 20th century to service locomotives of the Chihuahua al Pacifico Railway and other lines running through the city, a period when Chihuahua's rail network was central to the state's mining and agricultural export economy. The circular building, designed with a rotating turntable at its center to route locomotives into individual repair bays arranged radially around the structure, functioned as an active maintenance facility for decades before rail traffic patterns shifted and the roundhouse fell out of industrial use in the mid-20th century. Following restoration, the building reopened as a museum and cultural center that preserves its original circular industrial architecture, including the roof trusses and much of the turntable mechanism, while repurposing the radial bays as gallery spaces for rotating exhibitions of contemporary art, photography, and design alongside permanent displays on the history of rail transport in Chihuahua. The adaptive reuse retained the building's distinctive circular footprint and much of its steel and brick construction, making the structure itself as much a historical exhibit as the artwork displayed within it. Interpretation blends the site's industrial railway history, presented through photographs and artifacts near the entrance, with a broader contemporary curatorial program in the surrounding galleries, giving the museum a dual identity as both a preserved piece of railway infrastructure and an active contemporary art venue.