Museo Rafael Coronel

The Museo Rafael Coronel occupies the roofless arcades and restored halls of the former Ex-Convento de San Francisco in the Barrio de San Francisco, a ten to fifteen minute walk north of Plaza de Armas. The Franciscan complex, founded in the sixteenth century and left partly in ruins after nineteenth-century secularization and later fires, now frames one of the most striking small-museum settings in Mexico: visitors pass through a still-open, sky-lit cloister of broken arches before entering enclosed galleries. The core of the collection is more than 5,000 masks gathered by painter Rafael Coronel, brother of muralist Pedro Coronel and son-in-law of Diego Rivera, representing regional dance and ritual traditions from across Mexico, displayed in dense, wall-to-ceiling arrangements that convey the scale of the country's mask-making culture. Additional rooms hold antique puppets, pre-Hispanic ceramic figures, colonial-era religious art and a set of preparatory drawings and sketches by Diego Rivera, given to the museum by the family. A visit runs an hour to ninety minutes, and the ruined cloister itself, planted with gardens and reflecting pools, is worth lingering in regardless of the museum's opening hours since parts of the grounds are visible from outside. The museum closes on Wednesdays and opens Thursday through Tuesday.