Museum
Casa de los Venados
Colonial mansion turned private museum, its thousands of folk-art pieces displayed room by room as if still lived among.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Casa de los Venados in Valladolid follows a fever dream a papier-mache artist had in Mexico City in nineteen thirty-six, and how the creatures born from it, alebrijes, ended up filling a room inside a colonial mansion named for a different guardian spirit, the deer. It traces the Venator family's own punning surname, the Maya reverence for deer that predates them, and the decades an American couple spent turning an abandoned ruin into a house for more than three thousand pieces of Mexican folk art. Listen for the skeleton brides and Frida Kahlo portraits along the way.
This audio guide was created using AI.