‘Conceived as a space for reflection on the indigenous heritage of the Mexican nation, it is considered a global benchmark in the study of humanity.’ These are the reasons given by the jury for awarding him the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for Concord, in addition to establishing a poetic dialogue between pre-Hispanic and contemporary architecture.
Opened on 17 September 1964 with the mission of researching, conserving, exhibiting and disseminating the country’s most important archaeological and ethnographic collections, this icon of 20th-century urban architecture, designed by the renowned architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, condenses the rich Mesoamerican indigenous heritage into its 45,000 square metres.
Throughout its eleven archaeological rooms, with more than 7,700 pieces, a narrative is established with Mexico’s multicultural melting pot, where lights and shadows recreate atmospheres that are both magical and sinister. Thus, the drama of history and the monumentality of such important pieces as the Sun Stone, also known as the Aztec Calendar, the Coatlicue, the Stone of Tízoc, the colossal heads of the Olmec culture weighing around fifteen tonnes and considered key pieces of the Mesoamerican mother culture of the Veracruz area, dating back some 3,000 years before Christ, or the Disc of Mictlantecuhtli, take on a special prominence in the dialogue between past and present.
The five ethnographic rooms display more than 5,700 objects, a generous collection of great intangible value due to their significance in terms of the worldview and daily life of the indigenous peoples who inhabited what is now Mexican territory.
A global milestone
In the heart of Chapultepec Forest, the largest urban natural space in the Americas, lies the National Museum of Anthropology, recognised as one of the ten most important museums of its kind in the world. An aerial view of the site gives an idea of its enormous dimensions.
‘Entering the Museum of Anthropology is like stepping into an architecture made of the solemn material of myth,’ said Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, who claimed that it was the closest thing to a temple because it has two wings and, at the back, like an altar, the Sun Stone, while the giant umbrella in the central courtyard, supported by a single eleven-metre column, filters the light like the ancient Mayan temples, while supporting one of the largest hanging roofs in the world.
In the central courtyard, a pond is a nod to the lake-dwelling past of the capital of the Mexica empire, Great Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.
The museum is designed to allow visitors to immerse themselves in the past, represented in a monumental symmetrical stone structure that evokes ancient pre-Columbian ceremonial spaces. ‘Indigenism and modernism,’ as anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz described it.
‘Our sun has set, but we know it will rise again.’ Those words spoken by Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica monarch, days before he was captured by Hernán Cortés, resonate as a premonition of what this museum means with its ambitious design, colossal dimensions and rich collections, making it one of the largest and most important in the world.
For the Mexicas, the sun represented both the creation and destruction of the world. The Sun Stone or Aztec Calendar, an enormous monolith weighing twenty-four tonnes and measuring three metres sixty-five centimetres in diameter, carved from volcanic stone in the shape of a wheel, is the smallest example of this circular conception of time in the pre-Hispanic period. Its graphics describe the movements of the stars and certain cycles in which months last twenty days, years last eighteen months, and centuries last fifty-two years.
First, it was placed next to the cathedral, then buried underground by Spanish priests and shot at by American soldiers during the 19th-century invasion, but it was eventually rescued and preserved to become one of the jewels of universal culture.
The sarcophagus of Pakal, the great Mayan ruler, is particularly interesting. On his tombstone, the monarch returns from the underworld as a corn seed sprouting from the earth in the form of an ear of corn.
Or the reconstruction of the front façade of a Teotihuacan temple, the mysterious civilisation that preceded the Mexicas. Specifically, the pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, a myth made up of other myths, a figure that spans all eras and embodies the pantheistic fusion of the sky represented by the quetzal bird and the earth by the serpent.
Mexico is a melting pot of cultures, shaped over centuries by the wisdom, creativity and resilience of its indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and diverse migrants. Every spoken language, every inhabited territory and every cultural expression has woven a rich and constantly evolving national identity, where collective memory becomes the soul of the nation.
In the words of Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos, during whose term of office it was built, ‘The Mexican people erect this monument in honour of the admirable cultures that flourished during the Pre-Columbian era in regions that are now part of the Republic. In light of the evidence of those cultures, today’s Mexico pays tribute to indigenous Mexico, in whose example it recognises characteristics of its national originality.’
