Palace of Fine Arts (Bellas Artes)

In front of you rises the Palace of Fine Arts, with its white Carrara marble façade and its dome of yellow and orange ceramic. It is the country's great cultural stage, but it took thirty years to finish and changed style along the way.

1From Art Nouveau to Art Deco

Porfirio Díaz commissioned the Italian Adamo Boari to design it as a replacement for the old National Theatre and to show it off during the 1910 Centennial of Independence. Work began in 1904 on the site of the former convent of Santa Isabel, but the extremely heavy building started to sink into the lake clay, and in 1910 the Revolution broke out. Work stopped in 1916 and Boari went back to Italy. In the early 1930s the architect Federico Mariscal took up the project and finished it in 1934, with Art Deco interiors full of pre-Hispanic motifs.

2A glass curtain

Inside is a unique treasure: the glass curtain of the main hall, made by Tiffany of New York from almost a million pieces of opalescent glass, depicting the Valley of Mexico with the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. Its walls also hold murals by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo.

In 1934 Rivera repainted here the mural that New York's Rockefeller Center had ordered destroyed: "Man, Controller of the Universe".

3What to look for

• The Pegasus statues by Agustí Querol on the plaza.
• The Harmony sculpture group by Leonardo Bistolfi above the main entrance.
• The ceramic dome, in shades of yellow and orange.