Torture and Capital Punishment Museum (Museo de la Tortura)

Taken from the Inquisition Palace, this museum has a permanent exhibition composed of 72 instruments of torture and humiliation, characteristic of the Inquisition and other authorities from the Middle Ages.

For a long period, this exhibition was housed in Palacio de Minería.

What is on display. The collection brings together more than seventy pieces —period objects and reproductions— used to punish and humiliate in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, from devices meant for minor offences and public shaming to mechanisms tied to capital punishment. Labels explain what each piece was for and the kind of judicial process it belonged to, so the visit reads as a history of criminal law and punishment rather than a gallery of objects.

The New Spain context. The subject connects to an institution that operated in this very city: the Tribunal of the Holy Office, whose palace stood a few blocks away beside Plaza de Santo Domingo. In New Spain most proceedings concerned heresy and Judaizing, and there are documented cases against Nahua ritual practices; executions were few —an estimated fifty or so across three centuries— but the machinery of surveillance and confiscation was extensive. The exhibition spent years at the Palacio de Minería before moving to Tacuba 15.

Getting there. The museum is at Tacuba 15, in the heart of the Historic Centre, in an area best covered on foot: Allende and Bellas Artes metro stations are a few blocks away, and the street links the Zócalo with Alameda Central. Several small museums sit nearby —the Perfume Museum and the Army Museum among them— enough to fill a morning.

Before you go in. Given the subject and the bluntness of some labels, this is not the best visit for young children. The collection is compact: an hour is enough to see it without rushing.