Rafael Coronel MuseumMuseo Rafael Coronel

Rafael Coronel Museum inhabits the roofless 16th c. Franciscan convent of San Francisco in Zacatecas, where weathered cloisters make the act of looking an encounter with time. Built from the painter Rafael Coronel’s collection, it is famed for thousands of masks that trace Mexican ritual life—dance, satire, devotion, and festival—shaped by Indigenous tradition and colonial reinvention. Pre-Hispanic works, including a stela of the maize goddess Xicomecoatl, reach back to older ideas of sustenance and sacred power.