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There's plenty in Guatemala City to occupy you for a couple of days. A textile and an anthropological museum will enhance your appreciation of ancient and indigenous cultures and get you ready to head into the highlands or El Petén. A pair of art museums display paintings and sculpture by Guatemalan masters; one focuses on the 2
There's plenty in Guatemala City to occupy you for a couple of days. A textile and an anthropological museum will enhance your appreciation of ancient and indigenous cultures and get you ready to head into the highlands or El Petén. A pair of art museums display paintin
There's plenty in Guatemala City to occupy you for a couple of days. A textile and an anthropological museum will enhanc
There's plenty in Guatemala City to occupy you for a couple of days. A textile and an anthropological museum will enhance your appreciation of ancient and indigenous cultures and get you ready to head into the highlands or El Petén. A pair of art museums display paintings and sculpture by Guatemalan masters; one focuses on the 20th century while the other goes back to colonial days. For families traveling with kids, there's a zoo and a children's museum. And if you're in town on a Sunday, you can stop by the Plaza Mayor, which explodes in a riot of music and color, with vendors selling handmade textiles and indigenous people wearing traditional dress. If you're lucky, you may even see one of Guatemala City's goatherds guiding his flock through the streets of the Old City and charging Q5 for a glass of fresh-squeezed milk.
The city's best museum, the Ixchel Museum of Indigenous Dress, focuses on textiles of Guatemala's indigenous community, with an impressive array of handwoven fabrics from 120 highland villages, some of which date from the 19th century. It will provide you with a good background in the regional differences among textiles before you head out to the highlands. You'll also find sculptures, photographs, and paintings, including works by Andres Curruchich, an influential Guatemalan folk painter. Multimedia and interactive weaving displays make the museum engaging for all ages—watch one of the short introductory videos describing the museum's holdings to get you grounded—and there's a café, a bookstore, and a terrific gift shop. The only drawback is its location—at the bottom of a long hill at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín.
6 calle final, zona 10,, Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01010, Guatemala
The capital's Cervecería Centroamericana has brewed the majority of the beer sold in Guatemala since 1886. If you've been traveling around the country, you've seen (and likely sampled) Gallo, its ubiquitous flagship beer, pronounced GAH-yo. The cervecería manufactures a complete line of beverages, including Gallo Light, Victoria lager, the dark bock beer Moza, and Malta Gallo malt liquor. Gallo, incidentally, is marketed in the United States, but under the name "Famosa." (A certain California winery already holds the rights to the "Gallo" name there.)
The brewery offers fun, informative hour-long tours in Spanish and English of its installations several blocks north of the Old City each Monday to Thursday at 8, noon, and 3 pm. (A taxi is the best way to get here.) Reservations are necessary, and should be made at least a week in advance. Best of all, the whole thing is free, and the tour concludes with samples (also free) in the brewery café.
3a Avenida Norte Final, Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01002, Guatemala
The small but lovely Botanical Garden at the northern end of Zona 10 contains an impressive collection of plants managed by the Universidad de San Carlos. Your ticket price also includes admission to a small, adjoining natural-history museum.
Avenida La Reforma, 0-63, Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01010, Guatemala
It's small, but the capital's zoo is well arranged and well maintained. The facility contains several exhibit areas, including the African savanna, the Asian subcontinent, the Mesoamerican tropics, and a down-home farm. You'll see everything from giraffes and elephants to cows and ducks. The zoo's proximity to the nearby Children's Museum makes a convenient outing for families with kids.
5 Calle Interior Finca La Aurora, Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01013, Guatemala
Via interactive exhibits, the capital's splendid Children's Museum takes the young and young-at-heart on a journey through space, the human body, a coffee plantation, and a giant Lego exhibit. Multiple tickets are available at a slight discount Friday afternoon and weekends. We recommend making a kids' day out by combining this museum with a visit to the nearby zoo.
5a Calle 10-00, Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01013, Guatemala
Dedicated to the history of the Maya, the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has a large and excellent collection of Mayan pottery, jewelry, masks, and costumes, as well as models of the ancient cities. The jade exhibit, in particular, is stunning. The museum is a must for understanding the link between ancient and modern Mayan cultures, but the exhibits are labeled in Spanish only.
6 Calle and 7 Av., Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01013, Guatemala
Surrealism and multimedia works are among the wide range of styles represented at the National Museum of Modern Art. Some of the collection does go back to the early-19th-century independence period. Many of Guatemala's most distinguished 20th-century artists are represented here, including Efraín Recinos and Zipacna de León. Exhibits include works by other Latin American artists from similar periods.
Salón No. 6, Finca Nacional “La Aurora”, Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01013, Guatemala
Religious figures, animals, and mythological half-animal–half-man creatures with stolid eyes, hawkish noses, and fierce poses inhabit this museum. Though much smaller than the city's other museums, Popol Vuh has an interesting display of well-preserved stone carvings from the Preclassic period, with the earliest pieces dating from 1500 BC. Some statues are quite large, all the more impressive given that they were each cut from a single stone. Also look for the "painted books," which were historical records kept by the Maya. The most famous is the museum's namesake, the Popol Vuh, otherwise known as the Mayan Bible, which was lost (and later recovered) after it was translated into Spanish. An ample collection of colonial artifacts and rotating special exhibits round out the museum's offerings. Monthly evening public lectures, in Spanish, deal with topics related to the institution's holdings.
Calle Manuel F. Ayau 6 Final St., Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01010, Guatemala
The so-called "lively zone" is undoubtedly the most cosmopolitan area of town. The daytime crowd is mostly business executives, but at night a more vivacious bunch takes over. The precise definition of the neighborhood differs depending on whom you talk to, but it roughly centers on the area from avenidas La Reforma and 4, and calles 12 and 14, fanning out from there. Streets accommodate pedestrians overflowing from the narrow sidewalks on which restaurants have introduced outdoor seating, and lines extend from bars. You won't find the boutiques that characterize most upscale neighborhoods; those that do exist are mostly inside the large, international chain hotels. An exception to this is Plaza Fontabella (4 Av. 12–59), an attractive outdoor mall with a variety of upscale shops selling everything from books to home decor to custom-made suits.
Guatemala City, Departamento de Guatemala, 01010, Guatemala
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