Guadalajara's most comprehensive museum tells the story of the city and the surrounding region from prehistory to the revolution. The ground floor houses a natural history collection whose unwitting star is a mightily impressive woolly mammoth skeleton. Other crowd-pleasers include displays about indigenous life and a superb collection of pre-Hispanic ceramics dating from 600 BC, including figurines, ceramics, and silver and gold artifacts.
The upper levels of the museum are devoted to colonial paintings depicting the Spanish conquest, as well as more austere religious allegories and a revolutionary wing where the guns, uniforms and desks of Mexico’s great rebels are on display. The building is well worth visiting for its architecture – a gorgeous tree-studded courtyard acts as its centerpiece. Many of the displays are labeled in Spanish only (although information cards in English are available).
