Ex-Convento de San Nicolás de Tolentino, Actopan

The Ex-Convento de San Nicolás de Tolentino in Actopan, Hidalgo, is one of the finest of the fortress-like Augustinian monasteries built across central Mexico in the 16th century as the Spanish evangelised the newly conquered land. Rising austere and massive from the plains, it is famed for its exceptional early colonial murals, in which European Renaissance imagery mingles with Indigenous artistic sensibility, most spectacularly across the walls of a soaring vaulted stairwell. An open chapel — a distinctively New World form designed to address large crowds of newly converted worshippers in the open air — and a towering single-nave church complete the ensemble, their scale and defensive appearance expressing both the ambition and the anxieties of the missionary friars. A remarkable survival of 16th-century colonial religious architecture and painting, the monastery stands among the most important monuments of Mexico's early evangelisation.