Museo Frida Kahlo (La Casa Azul)

The ground floor opens into the courtyard — the blue walls, the pyramid Diego Rivera built for pre-Hispanic figures, the black volcanic stone underfoot. The first rooms hold paintings, and they are not the famous ones: the great self-portraits are in collections abroad and at the Museo Dolores Olmedo's former holdings. What hangs here is smaller and stranger — Viva la Vida, the watermelons painted eight days before she died, sits in the dining room area, and the family portraits explain the household rather than the icon.

The studio and the bed

Upstairs is the reason most people come. The studio was fitted for her after 1946: the easel Nelson Rockefeller gave her, brushes in jars, the wheelchair drawn up to it. Next door the day bed carries the mirror fixed into its canopy, the arrangement that made the self-portraits possible during the months she could not stand.

Her ashes are in the pre-Hispanic urn in the room beyond.

The wardrobe, opened in 2004

Diego Rivera ordered her clothes and personal effects sealed in the bathroom after her death; they stayed shut for fifty years and were opened in 2004. The rotating display of Tehuana dresses, the plaster corsets she painted, the prosthetic leg with the red boot — this is the part of the house that changes what people think they know about her, and it is the newest part of the museum.

The kitchen and the garden

The yellow-and-blue kitchen with the names DIEGO and FRIDA spelled out in tiny mugs, the long table where the household ate, and a garden that is small enough to cross in a minute and worth sitting in for ten. In the rainy season the courtyard is the driest place to wait out a shower.

Guillermo Kahlo, a photographer born in Germany, built the house on what was then the edge of the village of Coyoacán in 1904. Frida was born in it in 1907 — she later gave 1910 as her birth year, the year the Revolution began, which tells you something about how she meant to be read. The polio at six and the tram accident at eighteen, when a handrail went through her pelvis, set the terms of the rest: long stretches in bed, dozens of operations, and the plaster corsets that are now in a case upstairs.

Diego, and the blue

She married Diego Rivera in 1929, divorced him in 1939 and remarried him a year later. They lived here in the 1930s and 1940s between spells in the United States and in the studio-houses at San Ángel, and it was Rivera who had the walls painted the cobalt blue everyone photographs. Leon Trotsky and Natalia Sedova lived in the house in 1937 after Rivera arranged their asylum; the room they used is part of the visit.

From house to museum, 1954 to 1958

Kahlo died here in July 1954, at 47. Rivera gave the house to the nation the following year and it opened as a museum in 1958, a year after his own death, with the rooms left as they stood. That decision is why this is a house museum rather than a gallery: what you are looking at is a domestic interior kept still, and the paintings are furniture in it.

The one substantial change since came in 2004, when the sealed bathroom was opened and its contents became the wardrobe display.

It is the most expensive single museum ticket in this guide — more than Teotihuacán or the Anthropology Museum at MX$210, more than three times the MX$95 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes — for a house you will walk in an hour, with few of the paintings the name promises.

It is worth it if what you want is the person: the studio, the bed, the corsets, the kitchen, the evidence of a life lived mostly in these rooms. It is not worth it if you came for a gallery of the famous self-portraits, and it is not worth crossing the city for on a day you have not booked. If you have one museum slot in Mexico City and no particular attachment to Kahlo, the Anthropology Museum gives you five times the hours for two thirds of the price.

The nearest stations are Coyoacán and Viveros/Derechos Humanos, both on Line 3, and both about a 20-minute walk from the museum through pleasant streets. Metro fares are MX$5 a trip on the operator's published tariff. An app car from the Centro Histórico takes 30 to 50 minutes depending on the hour and is the sensible choice if your slot is tight — Coyoacán's traffic on a Sunday is its own event.

Once you are there everything is walkable: the museum, the Jardín Centenario, the Mercado de Coyoacán and Casa Kahlo are inside a square kilometre. Getting around has the full transport picture.

Photography is included, video is not. The ticket covers photographs taken on a mobile device without flash; recording video anywhere in the museum, inside or out, is prohibited.

Nothing over 35 cm. Backpacks and parcels larger than that must be deposited — and the museum's page notes the cloakroom is currently out of service, so arrive with a small bag or leave it at the hotel.

The ticket is named and timed. It is bought for a person and an hour; both are checked.

The closures are longer than the Monday. Add 1 May, 16 September, 1 and 25 December and 1 January to the weekly Monday, and check before you buy a date near a public holiday.

The route is one-way and narrow. Ten rooms, some of them barely wider than two people, with a staircase to the studio. A slot with a coach group in it feels crowded in a way a big museum never does, which is the real argument for the first or the last hour rather than midday.

The upstairs is the point. If you are short of time, walk the ground floor briskly and give the hour to the studio, the bed and the wardrobe. Almost everyone reports the reverse — reading every label downstairs, then rushing what they came for.

Combine, or come back. The museum's Ruta Frida y Diego adds Anahuacalli, 20 minutes south, and turns the visit into a day. If you would rather have the afternoon free, take an early slot and go to Xochimilco instead, where the boats run until evening.

In the rainy season, book the morning. Coyoacán's streets are cobbled and the afternoon downpours from June to September are heavy enough to strand you under an awning for an hour. A 10:00 slot puts the house behind you before it starts; the season detail has the monthly figures.

Take a mid-morning slot, walk to the Mercado de Coyoacán for tostadas, and be at an Xochimilco embarcadero by two, which leaves time for two hours on the water before the afternoon rain in season. That is the third day of the three-day itinerary.

The alternative is to pair it with Anahuacalli on the museum's own combined route and give the whole day to the two houses — slower, and better if you already know you care about the work rather than the ticking off.

For how this half day fits the rest of a first visit, start from the independent Mexico City guide.