Mexico Guide
Northern Jalisco and Michoacán
Museo Regional
Opening time: Tues– Sat 9am–5.30pm, Sun 9am–4.30pm
Price: M$33, free Sun
Just north of the cathedral, the Museo Regional is housed in an eighteenth-century colonial mansion. Over time it's been a religious seminary, a barracks and a school; it's now a supremely elegant setting for an extensive and diverse collection. Downstairs, exhibits start with a section devoted to regional archeology and range from stone tools and the skeleton of a mammoth to the finest achievements of western Mexican pottery and metalworking. The peoples of the west developed quite separately from those in southern and central Mexico, and there is considerable evidence that they had more contact with South and Central American cultures than with those who would now be regarded as their compatriots. The deep shaft tombs displayed here are unique in Mexico, but were common down the Pacific coast in Peru and Ecuador. In the centuries before the Conquest, the Tarascan kingdom, based around Pátzcuaro, almost came to rival the strength of the Aztecs – partly due to their more extensive knowledge and use of metals. The Aztecs tried, and failed, to extend their influence over Tarascan territory; it wasn't until after Cortés's destruction of Tenochtitlán that the Tarascans submitted relatively peacefully to the conquistadors.
Upstairs, along with rooms devoted to the state's modern history and ethnography, is a sizeable gallery of colonial and modern art. Most remarkable here is the large collection of nineteenth-century portraiture, a local tradition that captures relatively ordinary Mexicans in a charmingly naive style.