Cuernavaca Travel Guide

The Jardín Borda in Cuernavaca — the 'city of eternal spring' — was built by 18th-century silver magnate José de la Borda as a colonial estate with terraced gardens, fountains and a pavilion. Later used by Emperor Maximilian as a summer retreat, it keeps a small theatre and waterworks from his time — among Cuernavaca's most elegant historic gardens.

The Museo Robert Brady occupies a 16th-century colonial mansion (a former Dominican residence) in Cuernavaca, where the American artist Robert Brady arranged his lifelong collection of folk art, pre-Hispanic objects, European painting and Asian pieces into a deeply personal 'house-museum'. Each room is staged by his own taste, colours and textures interweaving — among Mexico's most singular private collections.

The Palacio de Cortés is among the oldest surviving colonial secular buildings in the Americas, ordered by Hernán Cortés around 1526 and set directly on the base of an Aztec tribute-collection post — remains of the pre-Hispanic walls are still visible in one corner of the courtyard. It has served as fortress, residence and state legislature, and since the 1970s has housed the regional museum of Cuernavaca. Along the upper loggia runs the mural Diego Rivera painted in 1929–30 on the conquest and the peasant revolution in Morelos, a major work of his mature period.

Xochicalco is a hilltop city in Morelos state that flourished between AD 650 and 900, after the collapse of Teotihuacán, and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999. Built on an artificially levelled hill, it served both defensive and ceremonial ends as a trading and political centre where several central-highland cultures met. Best known is the well-preserved band of relief around the base of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, coiled serpents set with calendrical signs; a rock-cut observatory shaft also admits the sun vertically at midday.