Palace of Iturbide

The palace does not hold a large standing collection of its own on permanent view. Its one fixed display is the period room described above, furnished to represent the building's eighteenth and nineteenth century occupants. Everything else a visitor sees is a temporary loan exhibition, changed two to three times a year and drawn from outside collections or from Fomento Cultural Banamex's wider holdings elsewhere; the building's own architecture, restored in 1972 and again by 2004, is treated by both the foundation and by visitors as the permanent exhibit that never leaves.

The palace was built between 1779 and 1785 for Miguel de Berrio y Zaldivar, Marques del Jaral de Berrio and Conde de San Mateo de Valparaiso, one of the richest men in New Spain. Several accounts, repeated on the foundation's own site and in secondary histories, describe it as a wedding gift for his daughter, its scale reportedly matched to a dowry of around 100,000 pesos. The architect Francisco Antonio Guerrero y Torres began the design; after his death the work was completed by his brother-in-law, Agustin Duran. The result is a New Spanish Baroque town palace on three main floors plus a mezzanine and, unusually for a viceregal residence, a fourth level formed by two towers joined by a gallery at the top of the facade.

The facade combines red tezontle volcanic stone with carved grey cantera in bands and cartouches, a materials pairing common to civil baroque buildings of the period but worked here with unusual density. Mexico City's own tourism office describes the facade as one of the finest examples of the city's 'civil baroque' architecture. The main portal, at street level, is carved with two atlantes figures flanking a mixtilinear cartouche that once carried the Berrio family's coat of arms, flanked by scrolled pilasters; wrought-iron balconies run the width of the upper floors, and round stone medallions punctuate the wall between them. The building was designed to be read from the street, at a time when Calle Madero (then Calle de San Francisco) was already one of the city's principal thoroughfares.

The palace carries the name of a man who never owned it. After Mexico's independence in 1821, the Berrio family, who by then lived in Spain, lent the building to Agustin de Iturbide, commander of the Army of the Three Guarantees. A period tile plaque set into the building's own facade, catalogued by the national Inspeccion General de Monumentos Artisticos e Historicos, records that this was Iturbide's residence when he was proclaimed emperor; the plaque itself dates the proclamation to 15 May 1822, while other secondary accounts give the acclamation as 18 or 19 May of the same year. What is consistent across sources is that Iturbide continued to live in the palace afterward and left it on 21 July 1822 to be formally crowned Agustin I. His reign lasted less than a year: forced to abdicate in March 1823, he went into exile, returned to Mexico in 1824 believing he still had support, and was captured and executed that July. The palace kept his name from the few months he occupied it as a guest, not as an owner.

After Iturbide's fall the building passed out of the Berrio family's use as a residence. From 1855 it operated as a hotel for roughly a century; a nineteenth-century print in the palace's own visual record, captioned 'Casa del Imperador Iturbide, hoy Hotel de las Diligencias Generales', documents this period directly, showing the building already known by both names at once, the emperor's house and the coach-line hotel. By the mid twentieth century the building had been altered for commercial use: ground-floor arcades had been built over with mezzanines, and the original grand staircase had been replaced by a smaller stair and an elevator.

The Banco Nacional de Mexico, known as Banamex, bought the palace in 1964-65 as part of a programme to rescue viceregal architecture the bank judged to be at risk. The restoration architect Ricardo Legorreta did not attempt a speculative recreation of the 1785 interior; instead he re-established the original floor levels by removing later paving, removed the commercial mezzanines under the ground-floor arcades, rebuilt the grand staircase, and replaced the courtyard's broken glazed roof with a new sloped skylight of his own design, adding a plain fountain beneath it. His own architecture studio still lists these choices as deliberate modern interventions rather than pastiche: new doors, a new elevator and staircase, wood flooring and hanging lamps, set inside the restored colonial fabric. From 1972 the building became the seat of Fomento Cultural Banamex, the bank's cultural foundation, functioning partly as offices and partly as an exhibition space.

A further restoration in the early 2000s completed the building's shift away from office use. It reopened in its present form on 19 January 2004 as the Palacio de Cultura Citibanamex, commonly known by the older name Palacio de Iturbide or, in some listings, as the Museo Antiguo Palacio de Iturbide. Mexico's federal cultural directory describes the current facilities as a library, a photographic archive, an interactive gallery with touchscreen displays, a museum room preserving portraits of the palace's original owners, and a permanent exhibit on the building's own architectural history, alongside the rotating temporary exhibitions that now occupy most of the ground and first floors.

The foundation mounts two to three major temporary exhibitions a year, and the sequence shows a deliberate range across Mexican visual culture rather than a single specialism. In 2022 the courtyard held a show of Yvonne Domenge's sculpture, which a Tripadvisor reviewer who saw it called world-class, paired upstairs with folk art addressing Mexico's difficult social history. From October 2023 to February 2024 the palace showed 'Teodora Blanco / Maria Izquierdo: Percepciones de belleza', pairing a celebrated Oaxacan potter with a modernist painter. From April to September 2024, to mark the 140th anniversary of Banco Nacional de Mexico, it showed Jan Hendrix's 'Atlas', a survey of natural structure that had already drawn more than 130,000 visitors elsewhere, alongside Remigio Mestas's 'Dia y Noche', on Oaxacan weaving and embroidery. In April 2025 it opened a 450-piece Miguel Covarrubias retrospective, drawn from 51 collections and organised into 14 thematic sections covering his work as caricaturist, ethnographer, cartographer and stage designer. By spring 2026 the courtyard held 'Barro y ceramica en Mexico: Poeticas de lo utilitario', bringing together more than 670 ceramic pieces from about 100 makers and workshops spanning three millennia, which its curators, Juan Coronel Rivera and Ana Elena Mallet, presented as the first exhibition to treat pre-Hispanic, popular and contemporary Mexican ceramics as a single continuous history rather than separate categories.

It is worth being precise about what kind of institution this is, because the palace's own billing can blur it. Fomento Cultural Banamex holds a large art collection built up since around 1920, reported in secondary sources at roughly 4,300 works and including pieces by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Manuel Alvarez Bravo; the foundation also operates several other historic houses of culture across Mexico, including the Museo Casa Montejo in Merida and houses in Durango and San Miguel de Allende. Nothing on the foundation's own site states how much, if any, of that wider collection is shown at this specific building rather than at its sister venues. What the Palacio de Iturbide itself guarantees a visitor, based on its own published programme, is the rotating temporary exhibition in the courtyard and upstairs, the single fixed period room on the building's own history, and the baroque structure itself, restored twice, in 1972 and again by 2004, specifically so it could be shown rather than merely occupied.

Visitors consistently describe the Palacio de Iturbide as a free, easy stop in the historic centre that rewards a short visit. Praise centres as much on the baroque building itself, the facade and the covered courtyard, as on whatever exhibition currently fills them, and reviewers repeatedly note that the show changes every few months, which makes a repeat visit worthwhile.