Mexico City – Museo Nacional De Antropolgia

The National Anthropology Museum is a one stop shop for Mexican antiquities. It was built to house all the good stuff from all over the country. For someone with an interest in archaeology like me, this place is Nirvana. For everyone else, it’s still pretty cool!


The building is located on one side of Chapultepec Park. The building itself is a architecturally very cool. The museum is built around a central atrium. The atrium has a roof, held up by a single column that has a fountain splashing water down the sides. It’s like an indoor waterfall. Very cool!

The museum is a bit deceptive, however. Once you’re in the front door, it looks a bit small. After all, there is only one atrium with about three or four doors on each side. Once you walk through one of these doors, you feel the scale of the place. It’s absolutely massive! Not only does each of the doors lead to a massive gallery, but the museum has two floors. So it’s massive, times two!


The collection is arranged by region and time period. So you have Maya room, an Aztec room, a Teotihuacan room etc. Each room has some very impressive artefacts in it. The show stopper for the entire collection is the sun disk found in down town Mexico City. It is a platform that was apparently used for sacrifices or fights, or some such. It’s truly massive and the detail on it is very impressive. It’s good to see the original, because every single shop in every single Mexican town has some form of it. It comes as a tea towel, a mug, a rug, a card, a model. The list is endless. It’s even on the currency.

Other sights not to be missed, are the reproduction of some of the sculptures from Teotihuacan. It allows you to get up close to the carvings, something which is not possible at the actual site. It also has a load of artefacts from the site.

My only grumble with the museum, is that everything is in Spanish That’s easy to understand, but a little annoying. You can hire audio guides and you can get pull out guides in some rooms, but it was a bit of a bother by the end.

Once I’d been through all the rooms downstairs, I had a bit of lunch. Bad move. There is a restaurant in the museum, but the food is pretty diabolical. I ordered off the menu. Perhaps the buffet would be better, but I was distinctly unimpressed by the quality of the food and the surly service. To see all the museum takes about half a day, so bring along a sandwich instead. Ewww... I can still remember the taste of the food there. Nasty!

After lunch and seeing all the downstairs galleries, I headed upstairs. My god, this place is massive. I beat a tactical retreat. There was no way I could go through all these galleries in the same detail I did downstairs. I think the museum realises this, so upstairs is a bit lame in comparison, almost willing you to breeze through. Upstairs is mainly recreations of typical native American life. Lots of arts and crafts and reconstructed houses and clothes. A lot of effort has gone into the museum, but I was just too tired to give it proper attention.


The other thing to mention, is that it’s dirt cheap to get in. I think it was about USD$4.50. For a museum of this calibre, they could easily charge ten times that amount and still have people queuing to get in.

A good feature of this museum and just about every museum in Mexico, is that you can take photos. As long as you don’t use a flash, the curators are happy for you to snap as many pics as you like. This is a huge change from most European museums. In Europe, the mere suspicion of a camera is enough to get a severe scolding from a grumpy old man in a blazer.

Due to its sheer size and quality, any trip to Mexico City is incomplete unless you visit this museum. It’s amazing.