Museo Soumaya

The Museo Soumaya is the private museum of Carlos Slim, opened in its present building in Plaza Carso in the Polanco district of Mexico City in 2011 and named after his late wife Soumaya Domit. Entry is free every day of the year, and the shining, twisted tower designed by Fernando Romero, clad in thousands of hexagonal aluminium tiles, has become one of the most photographed buildings in the city. An older branch of the museum still operates at Plaza Loreto in the south of the city.

The collection runs to some sixty six thousand works across six floors. Its greatest strength is sculpture: the museum holds the largest group of Rodin bronzes outside France, shown on the top floor under a floating roof, together with a large collection of Salvador Dalí bronzes. There are old masters from Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, including El Greco and Tintoretto, a strong group of colonial painting from New Spain, French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists including Monet, Renoir, Degas and Van Gogh, Mexican art from Rivera and Tamayo to the twentieth century, and eccentric collections of coins, ivories and decorative art.

The museum is designed to be walked from the top down. Take the lift to the sixth floor, where Rodin and Dalí stand in daylight, and follow the spiral ramp through the floors devoted to Mexican art, the Impressionists, the old masters and the decorative arts, ending in the vestibule with the Gates of Hell, Rivera's mosaic and Tamayo's murals.