Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City

Interesting facts

The Tiffany glass curtain is made of 206 panels, measures about 12.5 by 14.5 metres and weighs roughly 22 tonnes.

Diego Rivera's mural here is his second version of a fresco for New York's Rockefeller Center, which was destroyed in 1934 after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin.

In the Mexico City version Rivera added Trotsky, Marx and Engels, and pointedly painted John D. Rockefeller Jr. drinking in a nightclub.

More than sixty notable Mexicans have lain in state in the palace, among them Frida Kahlo in 1954, Diego Rivera in 1957 and Gabriel García Márquez in 2014.

The first figure to lie in state here was the muralist José Clemente Orozco in 1949, whose own fresco Katharsis hangs inside.

Maria Callas made her Mexican debut on the palace stage in 1950, singing the title role in Bellini's Norma.

The four bronze Pegasus sculptures by the Catalan artist Agustí Querol originally stood in the Zócalo before being brought to the palace.

The site once held the Convent of Santa Isabel and later the old National Theatre, demolished in 1901 to make way for the new building.

An Art Deco light panel inside reinterprets the face of the Maya rain god Chaac, a nod to Mexico's ancient past amid the modern styling.

The palace opened on 29 November 1934 with La verdad sospechosa, a comedy by the Mexican-born Golden Age playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón.

Why it is worth it

The Palacio de Bellas Artes is Mexico City's temple of the arts, and its history is written in its two faces. Outside it is all Art Nouveau and Neoclassical exuberance: a white marble mass, clad in stone from Carrara and from Yautepec, Inside, the lobbies and halls are crisp Art Deco. The difference is the Mexican Revolution. The Italian architect Adamo Boari began the building in 1904, when President Porfirio Díaz laid the first stone, but work stalled completely by 1913. Only in the 1930s did the Mexican architect Federico Mariscal take it up again, finishing it in 1934 and giving the interior the style of his own day.

The weight of all that marble on the soft old lakebed beneath the city has had a visible result: the palace has sunk by around four metres since construction began. It is one of the best demonstrations of the ground Mexico City is built on, and part of the building's odd charm.

Its treasures are unusual ones. The theatre's safety curtain is a folding screen of stained glass made by the Tiffany studios in New York, containing close to a million pieces of iridescent glass and showing the Valley of Mexico with the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. Overhead, the auditorium's glass ceiling by the Hungarian artist Géza Maróti shows Apollo and the Muses. The upper floors hold some of the defining murals of twentieth-century Mexico: Diego Rivera's Man, Controller of the Universe alongside major works by José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo.

The 1,590-seat theatre is home to opera, concerts and the Ballet Folklórico de México, which brings dances from across the country to its stage. The building was declared an artistic monument in 1987 and stands at the edge of the Alameda Central, the historic park of the city centre.

Getting there

The palace stands in the Cuauhtémoc borough, in the historic centre of Mexico City, beside the Alameda Central. Mexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX) is about 7.5 km away.

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From the encyclopaedia

The Palacio de Bellas Artes is a prominent cultural center in Mexico City. It hosts performing arts events, literature events and plastic arts galleries and exhibitions. "Bellas Artes" for short, has been called the "art cathedral of Mexico", and is located on the western side of the historic center of Mexico City which is close to the Alameda Central park.

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