Mexico 2018 - Zacatecas

In both February and March, there are a lot of festivals and holidays in Guanajuato (and in Mexico in general) culminating in Semana Santa.  The city seems to fill up more with each long weekend and almost every weekend seems to be a long weekend.  Then we saw that the annual car rally was looming and knew that it would bring a lot of weekend visitors and a lot of car noise so we thought it might be a good time for that visit to Zacatecas we had been talking about.  I've been to Zacatecas a couple of times in the past and I like the city.  Some five hours north on the bus, Zacatecas is the capital city of the state by the same name.  Like Guanajuato, it is a UNESCO site, a former silver mining city, blessed with a lovely colonial core, and a city with an abundance of art and culture.  In fact, Zacatecas has the most museums per capita of any city in Mexico.  Several famous Mexican artists are from Zacatecas and have fostered the flourishing of arts there.  Brothers Raphael and Pedro Coronel, each notable artists, have museums in their names filled with their collections of astonishing art from around the world.  But I'll come back to them.  The first one we visited was the Museo de Francisco Goitia.  Goitia was an artist working in the same period as the famous muralists but was much lesser known, a reclusive and difficult person.  He nonetheless left some great works, a few of which are on display in this museum, enough so that there was a museum named after him. The building and the grounds are probably the most noteworthy part of the place; the art was so-so with the exception of Goitia's pieces which were very good.  

 

 The grounds around the museum and the park below it are beautifully tended, lush and green in contrast to the arid landscape.

This aqueduct was built in the early 19th century and functioned until the 1920s.

On to the next museum shortly