Moments from Museo Soumaya

Funded by Carlos Slim, one of the wealthiest people in the world, and named for his late wife, the Museo Soumaya moved in 2011 into a startling building in Mexico City's Plaza Carso: a curving, windowless silver structure covered in roughly sixteen thousand hexagonal aluminum tiles, designed by Fernando Romero, Slim's son-in-law, that looks from a distance almost like a molten, hourglass-shaped sculpture in its own right. Admission is entirely free, a deliberate decision by Slim, and the collection inside is genuinely eclectic by design, European Old Masters, an enormous holding of Rodin bronzes, reportedly the largest collection outside the Musee Rodin in Paris, and Mexican art spanning colonial religious painting through the twentieth century.

Because the collection ranges so widely without a single unifying curatorial thesis, treat a visit more like exploring a very wealthy individual's personal passions than a conventional museum narrative, which it essentially is. The building's swooping interior ramps, similar in spirit to the Guggenheim's spiral, are worth appreciating as you move between floors, and given that admission costs nothing, it's an easy add-on to a day already built around the nearby Museo Jumex and Polanco's gallery district.