Diego Rivera's history of Mexico, painted across a staircase over sixteen years, in the building where the president works.
The Palacio Nacional occupies the whole eastern side of the Zócalo, on the site of Moctezuma’s palace, built from its stone after 1521 and rebuilt and extended ever since.
It is the seat of the federal executive and, since 2018, the president’s residence, which is why access has become less predictable.
The murals
Diego Rivera painted the main staircase between 1929 and 1935, and the corridor panels above it between 1942 and 1951, and together they are the single most ambitious statement of the Mexican mural movement.
The staircase is one continuous composition read across three walls:
North wall — pre-Hispanic Mexico. Quetzalcoatl, the crafts, agriculture, the codices, an idealised Tenochtitlan.
West wall — the conquest and the colonial centuries, the independence war, the American invasion, the French intervention, the Revolution. Cortés is painted as syphilitic and hunched. Zapata, Villa, Hidalgo, Juárez and Morelos are all identifiable, as is Frida Kahlo among the figures.
South wall — Rivera’s Marxist future, with Marx pointing the way and industry replacing exploitation.
The corridor panels on the first floor show pre-Hispanic life in detail — the Tlatelolco market, maize cultivation, cacao, rubber, dyeing, and the making of paper. They were left unfinished at eleven of a planned larger series.
Reading them
Rivera is not neutral and does not pretend to be. This is a nationalist, anti-clerical, Marxist account of Mexican history painted for a revolutionary government that wanted exactly that.
It is also extraordinarily rich in detail — the panels reward twenty minutes each — and there is no better single introduction to how Mexico narrates itself.
Access
This is the practical difficulty. The palace has at various points been:
- freely open with photographic identification
- open by advance online registration
- closed to the public entirely for security or works
Since it became a presidential residence the pattern has been less predictable, and closures happen at short notice.
Check before going. If it is shut, the murals at Bellas Artes and the Secretaría de Educación Pública — which holds 235 Rivera panels across three floors of courtyards and is usually easier to enter — cover much of the same ground.
Also inside
The Recinto Homenaje a Benito Juárez, the rooms where the reforming president lived and died in 1872.
The Campana de Dolores, the bell Hidalgo rang in 1810, hangs above the central balcony. Every 15 September the president rings it and delivers El Grito to the crowd in the Zócatlo below — the largest public event in the Mexican year.
Practicalities
Free when open. Photographic identification is normally required and bags are searched.
Allow two hours for the murals alone.
More History
Plaza de las Tres Culturas
An Aztec temple, a colonial church and a modernist housing block around one square, and a massacre in 1968 that the state denied for decades.
Casa Luis Barragán
The house of Mexico's greatest modern architect, kept exactly as he left it, and visitable only by booked tour.