Palacio de Bellas Artes

Where it sits. The Palacio de Bellas Artes stands on the eastern edge of the Alameda Central, the oldest public park in the Americas, where Avenida Juárez meets Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas in the historic centre of Mexico City. It is about 700 metres west of the Zócalo along Calle Francisco I. Madero, the pedestrian street that links the two. The building is faced in white Carrara marble, topped by a dome of orange and yellow tiles with a bronze eagle at the apex, and flanked in its forecourt by Pegasus sculptures by the Catalan sculptor Agustí Querol. Across the street the Torre Latinoamericana, finished in 1956, gives the classic overhead view of the palace and its dome from a 44th-floor observation deck.

A building that took thirty years. Porfirio Díaz commissioned a new national theatre for the 1910 centenary of independence and gave the job to the Italian architect Adamo Boari, who began work in 1904 in an eclectic Art Nouveau manner. Two problems followed. The first was the ground: the city sits on the compressible clay of a drained lake, and the heavy marble structure began to settle almost immediately — it has sunk roughly four metres below its original level, and the entrance steps had to be reworked as the pavement rose around it. The second was the Revolution, which halted construction in 1913 and sent Boari home. The shell stood open to the weather until 1932, when Federico Mariscal completed it in a far more austere Art Deco idiom; the contrast between the florid marble exterior and the geometric interior of onyx, bronze and stepped ornament is the building's defining oddity. It opened on 29 November 1934.

What is inside. The stage curtain is a mosaic of nearly a million pieces of opalescent glass made by Tiffany Studios in New York, showing the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl above the Valley of Mexico; it weighs over twenty tonnes and is raised and lit before certain performances. Around the upper floors hang some of the most important murals in the country: Diego Rivera's El hombre controlador del universo, his 1934 recreation of the fresco destroyed at Rockefeller Center after he refused to remove Lenin's portrait; David Alfaro Siqueiros's Nueva democracia; José Clemente Orozco's Katharsis; and work by Rufino Tamayo and Roberto Montenegro. The concert hall is home to the National Symphony Orchestra and to the Ballet Folklórico de México, founded by Amalia Hernández in 1952, which performs a programme of regional dance most Wednesdays and Sundays. The building also functions as the country's civic funeral chamber: Frida Kahlo lay in state here in 1954, wrapped in a communist flag in a scandal that cost a museum director his job, as later did Diego Rivera, Cantinflas, Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Gabriel.

On screen. The palace anchors the opening act of Spectre (2015), Sam Mendes's second Bond film. The Day of the Dead parade that carries the film's celebrated long take was staged in March 2015 along Francisco I. Madero and the surrounding avenues, forming up in the streets beside the Alameda and moving east to the Zócalo, where the sequence ends in a helicopter fight. The palace and its tiled dome appear in the sequence's aerial photography as the camera sweeps across the historic centre rather than in any dialogue scene — it is scenery rather than a set, but it is the landmark that tells an audience which city this is. The parade was invented for the film; Mexico City has staged a real one every year since 2016 in response, and the route passes the palace.

Practical detail. The interior is open as a museum from Tuesday to Sunday, with a separate ticket for the mural floors and a fee for photography; the concert hall itself is only accessible with a performance ticket or on a scheduled tour, and the Tiffany curtain is displayed at the start of Ballet Folklórico performances. Tickets for those sell out well ahead in high season. Bellas Artes metro station, on lines 2 and 8, opens at the corner of the building, and the Alameda outside is a pleasant place to wait, with the Museo Mural Diego Rivera at its western end holding Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central.

Timing. Weekday mornings are the quietest hours inside. The dry months from November to April give the crisp light that shows the marble best; the rainy season from June to September usually delivers its downpour in the late afternoon. The building is one of the few major monuments in the centre with lifts and level access throughout, which makes it a reliable choice for visitors who cannot manage the stairs elsewhere in the historic district.