2 Best Sights in Coyoacán, Mexico City

From the house's original entrance on Calle Morelos (around the corner from the current museum entrance) with its forbidding high walls and turrets for armed guards, you get a sense of just how precarious life was for its final resident, León Trotsky, one of the most important figures of the Russian Revolution. Living in exile, Trotsky moved his family here in 1939 at the behest of his friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (who resided in Casa Azul, just a few blocks away). Less than a year later, he would be assassinated. The house and adjoining exhibit galleries make for an eerily fascinating glimpse of Trotsky's later life and death. As you walk through the house, which looks largely as it did the day of his death, you'll see bullet holes still in the walls from the first assassination attempt, in which the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was implicated. The rooms include his bedroom, his wife's study, the dining room and kitchen, and the study where assassin Ramón Mercader (a man of many aliases) drove a pickax into Trotsky's head. On his desk, cluttered with writing paraphernalia and an article he was revising in Russian, the calendar is open to that fateful day: August 20, 1940.

Although open only on weekends, this palatial former home of Emilio "El Indio Fernández"—one of the greatest directors in Mexican cinematic history—is well worth a visit any time of year, but is especially a must-see during the weeks around Día de Muertos, when its rooms and gardens abound with remarkably extensive and colorful ofrendas (altars). The fortresslike home, built in the 1940s of volcanic rock with a design influenced by prehistoric temples, is filled with movie memorabilia, and vendors sell crafts, food, and other goods in the house's tree-shaded front courtyard. There are also theatrical presentations and other events throughout the year, some with additional admission charges.