Mexico City - National History Museum

(Local Name: Museo Nacional de Historia) On the top of a hill in the south-east corner of the park towers Chapultepec Castle (Castillo de Chapultepec), access to which is on foot, by bus or by lift.

Chapultepec Castle was built at the end of the 18th c. by the Spanish Viceroy Conde de Gálvez, as a summer residence, on a site once occupied by Aztec buildings and later by a Spanish hermitage. In 1841 it became a military academy, which six years later was to be the last Mexican stronghold against U.S. troops. Maximilian and Charlotte made the castle their residence and carried out various alterations in 1864-65. The dictator Porfirio Díaz also used it as a summer residence from 1884 onwards. In 1944 Chapultepec Castle finally became the National History Museum (Museo Nacional de Historia). The Museum's nineteen rooms contain, in addition to a collection of pre-Columbian material and reproductions of old manuscripts, a vast range of exhibits illustrating the history of Mexico since the Spanish conquest. These include arms and armour, documents, maps and plans of the Conquest period and its immediate aftermath; furniture, ceramics, clothing, jewellery and coins from three centuries; relics and souvenirs of the struggle for independence and the revolutionary wars; portraits of leading figures in Mexican history; frescos by Orozco, Siqueiros and O"Gorman, and a number of state carriages, including those used by Benito Juárez and the Emperor Maximilian. The apartments occupied by Maximilian and Charlotte, decorated in Neo-Classical style, contain the furniture which they brought from Europe.

From the castle there is a superb view of the city on a fine day.