The museums worth your morning
The best museum in Quito is not the one on the tourist map, and the most important artist Ecuador has produced is a taxi ride north of the Old Town in a building he designed and did not live to see finished. Neither appears on most two-day itineraries, which is a shame, because between them they explain the country better than any church does.
The short version
- Casa del Alabado — pre-Columbian art, superbly curated, next to Plaza San Francisco. The one to do first.
- Guayasamín and the Capilla del Hombre — the most powerful thing in the city, and a taxi ride away.
- Museo de la Ciudad — how Quito actually worked, in a sixteenth-century hospital.
- Most museums close on Mondays. Plan a Monday around plazas and churches instead.
- Rain arrives in the afternoon. This is the rain plan.
Casa del Alabado
A colonial house beside Plaza San Francisco holding several thousand years of pre-Columbian art from the cultures that lived here before anyone had heard of Spain — Valdivia, Chorrera, Jama-Coaque, La Tolita.
What makes it exceptional is not the objects, remarkable though they are, but the decision behind the display. It is arranged by cosmology rather than by chronology: the world below, the world of the living, the world above, shamanic transformation. You move through it as a way of seeing rather than a timeline, in near-dark rooms with the pieces lit like the ceremonial objects they were.
Allow an hour and a half. If you have time for one paid museum in Quito, this is it — and it will change how you look at everything you see afterwards, including the faces carved into the churches.
Guayasamín and the Capilla del Hombre
Oswaldo Guayasamín, who died in 1999, is the artist most Ecuadorians would name first, and one of the major Latin American painters of the twentieth century. Of Kichwa and mestizo descent, he spent his career painting the suffering of Indigenous and poor people across the Americas — enormous canvases of hands, faces, mouths open in grief.
Two sites sit together on a hillside in the north of the city, half an hour by taxi from the Old Town.
La Casa Museo is where he lived and worked, with his own collection of pre-Columbian and colonial art alongside his studio, left much as it was.
La Capilla del Hombre — the Chapel of Man — is the building he designed as the culmination of his life's work and did not live to see completed. It is not a chapel in any religious sense; it is a monument to the human beings of Latin America, and specifically to those the official histories left out. The central space, with an eternal flame and a vast canvas of the workers who died in the silver mines of Potosí, is one of the few rooms anywhere that reliably silences people.
It is political, unambiguous and not comfortable, which is the point. Allow half a day including the journey, and go with the expectation of being affected rather than entertained.
Museo de la Ciudad
Housed in the old San Juan de Dios hospital, which operated from the sixteenth century until the 1970s — meaning the building is itself the first exhibit. The collection covers how Quito actually functioned: the water, the trades, the convents, the earthquakes, the people who built the churches and did not get to sit in the front rows.
Good on the parts of colonial history the churches leave out. An hour, and it is a five-minute walk from Plaza San Francisco.
Museo del Carmen Alto
A working Carmelite convent for centuries, part of which is now open. It documents the cloistered life of the nuns who lived and died inside without leaving — the turnstile through which they passed goods to the outside world without being seen, the cells, the routines.
It is small, strange and quiet, and it is consistently the museum guests tell us afterwards they are glad they found. Half an hour to forty-five minutes.
Yaku, and a note for families
The water museum, built on the hillside where the city's colonial water supply arrived, with interactive exhibits, outdoor space and one of the better views over the Old Town. It is aimed at children and it does that job well, without being useless for adults.
Worth pairing with the fact that it is uphill and around 2,900 m — a taxi both ways, and not on your first day. See Quito with children.
Practical notes
- Mondays. Most museums in Quito close. A Monday is for the Changing of the Guard, plazas and churches — see 48 and 72 hours in Quito.
- Prices and hours change and several institutions have had extended closures for restoration. Ask us on the day rather than trusting a page — including this one.
- Entry is cheap by any international standard, and some municipal museums have free days.
- Cash in small bills. Card payment is unreliable at the smaller ones.
- Photography is restricted in several collections, and enforced.
- Afternoons. Since the rain comes late in the day, museums are the natural second half of a Quito day. Do the outdoor things in the morning.
If you only have time for one
Casa del Alabado, on a morning in the Old Town, because it is close, short and will reframe everything else you see.
Unless you have half a day and any interest in art or in Latin American history, in which case take the taxi north to Guayasamín. Guests who go come back changed by it in a way they rarely are by a church, however gilded.
What we do here
Reception will tell you what is actually open today, what it costs this month, and whether the museum you read about is currently closed for restoration — which happens more often than any website admits. We are a five-minute walk from the Old Town collections and can call a taxi for the trip north to Guayasamín.
Churches in the morning, museums when it rains
Nine rooms in a restored 1914 house on the quiet edge of the Old Town. Book direct for our lowest rate, and ask at breakfast what is open today.
See our best dealsTake this with you
Useful when the afternoon turns wet and you need a plan.
