Museo Mural Diego Rivera

Rivera painted Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda in 1947 for the dining room of the Hotel del Prado across the street. When the 1985 earthquake condemned the hotel, the fifteen-metre, thirty-five-tonne fresco was cut free and trundled whole across the avenue to a museum built around it - one room, one masterpiece. The wall repays the pilgrimage: a promenade through the park outside compressing four centuries of Mexican history into a single crowd. Cortes with bloodied hands, Sor Juana, Santa Anna, Juarez, Porfirio Diaz and the revolutionaries all stroll together, and at the center stands la Catrina - Posada's skeleton dandy, given her famous feathered serpent boa here for the first time - holding hands with Rivera painted as a pudgy boy, with Frida Kahlo behind him. Reading panels decode every figure, and the museum salts the room with Posada prints and the mural's storm-tossed history, including the repaired scar where its "God does not exist" inscription once provoked a riot.

What you actually see

• The mural itself - fifteen metres of history promenading in the Alameda.
• La Catrina - the skeleton in her Sunday best, center stage between Posada and young Rivera.
• The figure key - panels naming all hundred-plus characters.
• The rescue story - how a thirty-five-tonne wall crossed an avenue.

When to go

Any day but Monday; mornings are quietest. Pair it with a walk through the real Alameda outside - the mural is best read fresh from the park it portrays.

Honest expectations

It is essentially a single-room museum - richly annotated, but under an hour for most visitors. Sundays are free and correspondingly busy. Photography without flash is allowed, but the full mural needs a wide lens.

Nearby

Alameda Central at the door, Bellas Artes at the park's far end and the Franz Mayer museum across the avenue.