Frida Kahlo Museum (Casa Azul)

The Casa Azul is the most intimate great museum in Mexico: the cobalt-blue house in Coyoacán where Frida Kahlo was born in 1907, lived the essential years of her life with Diego Rivera, and died in 1954 in the upstairs bedroom — kept not as a gallery of her paintings (the majors hang elsewhere) but as the preserved habitat of the century's most mythologised artist. That is precisely its power: you come for the art and stay pinned by the objects — the wheelchair at the easel with an unfinished still life, the mirror over the four-poster bed her mother installed after the bus accident so the bedridden teenager could paint her only available subject, and the painted plaster corsets she decorated because she had to wear them anyway.

The house loops around a garden courtyard of volcanic rock and calla lilies. The collection opens with works she kept — Viva la Vida, the defiant watermelons finished days before her death, Long Live Life — and Rivera pieces, folk art, retablos and photographs thick with the supporting cast (Trotsky, Breton, the whole revolving salon of mid-century Coyoacán; Trotsky's own house-museum, bullet holes intact, is ten minutes' walk and pairs devastatingly). The kitchen — yellow and blue, FRIDA and DIEGO spelled in tiny clay cups on the wall — and her dresses in the final room, the Tehuana wardrobe that was itself a manifesto, close the visit at maximum emotional load.

The craft is entirely about tickets: the Casa Azul is small, capped, and Mexico City's hardest cultural entry — timed tickets sell out days to weeks ahead and the walk-up queue is a heartbreak machine. Book online early (photo permit is a small add-on; weekday first slots are quietest), give it 90 minutes, and let Coyoacán complete the half-day: the plaza with its coyote fountain, the market's tostadas, and the Trotsky pairing for the full doomed-salon experience. The Xochimilco-plus-Coyoacán tour products bundle the entry with the trajineras for a legitimately great full day — book whichever version secures the ticket, because the ticket is the whole game.