National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City’s Most Impressive Museum
During a short visit to Mexico City a few weeks ago, I decided to stop into the largest and most visited museum in Mexico – Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology). The building was designed in 1964 by award-winning Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, along with Jorge Campuzano, and Rafael Mijares Alcérreca, and contains significant archaeological and anthropological artifacts from Mexico’s pre-Columbian heritage, dating from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 1521. In all, the museum features 23 permanent exhibit halls and covers an area of 857,890 square feet (almost 20 acres!).
National Museum of Anthropology
Admission to the museum, which is open Tuesday through Sunday 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. all year, runs $75.00 MXN (about $4 US). I figured I’d spend a couple of hours at the museum then walk over to the main park in Mexico City, Bosque de Chapultepec. What I didn’t anticipate was the size of the museum – it’s huge! Took me about five hours to view the exhibits and many of them were pretty spectacular.
Luckily for all of you, I had my new Sony A7 III camera and a few good lenses. Enjoy the photographs…
In the museum’s inner courtyard stands a towering fountain named “El Paraguas” (The Umbrella) featuring a bronze column carved by José and Tomás Chávez Morado, artist brothers from Guanajuato, Mexico.
Statue of Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of the “horizontal waters”, found in Teotihuacán…
The Aztec Piedra del Sol (Sun Stone) is perhaps the most famous work of Aztec sculpture. Shortly after the Spanish conquest, the monolithic sculpture was buried in the Zócalo, the main square of Mexico City. The monolith was carved in the Mesoamerican Postclassic Period, between 1250 and 1521 AD.
Outdoor gardens surround the indoor exhibitions…
The Olmec colossal heads are stone representations of human heads sculpted from large basalt boulders. The heads date from at least 900 BC and are a distinctive feature of the Olmec civilization of ancient Mesoamerica…
The Museo Nacional de Antropología is a museum very much worth visiting should you find yourself in Mexico City (and you really should find yourself there one day). Make sure you give yourself enough time to peruse its 857,890 square feet – you won’t be sorry you did. Promise.
You can view the FULL SET OF PHOTOGRAPHS on my
Check out these additional photography posts from my visits to Mexico City:
