CECUT Tijuana

If there is one place that sums up all that is interesting about the city by telling its own story, and where there are plenty of art-filled days, it’s the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT). It is an organization which belongs to the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (National Board for Culture and Arts), which since 1982 has allowed for the artistic expressions that develop on the border. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Manuel Rosen Morrison are the architects who brought this project to life.

Walking through its installations is like walking through a tiny country; it has an aquarium housing around 500 specimens of species from the Gulf of California, the Pacific, Australian coral reefs, and other parts of the world. There is a botanic garden, with more than 150 species that represent the state’s plant life, which you can visit in different spaces within CECUT. The Carlos Monsiváis hall is, for lovers of the seventh art, the place where you can watch the best of international, Mexican, and Latin American cinematography. The IMAX dome known as La Bola (literally “The Ball”) is the building’s emblem and the second cinema in Mexico to have this technology.

The CECUT is the most important cultural center not just in the city, but in the whole of Mexico’s northeast. The art gallery El Cubo is an interesting space with three floors that house temporary exhibitions, and the Museo de las Californias revisits Tijuana and the peninsula’s past. See the very distant past up close with the replicas of the cave paintings, in the style of the Gran Mural, that were discovered in the Sierra de San Francisco, or the hunting tools that belonged to the region’s ancient inhabitants. Baskets, ceramic pieces and puppets pay testament to the existence of the Yumanos, the ethnolinguistic family that spread out into different ethnic groups across the Baja California and Sonora deserts in Mexico, and throughout Arizona and California in the United States. It also has model ships that tell the story of the conquistador explorers back in the days when very little was known about the Californian coast, and you can see models of the multiple religious missions that were built throughout the peninsula. You can see Spanish armor, 19th century oil paintings of religious scenes, and models of the French-style buildings in the town of Santa Rosalía. Completing the museum’s repertoire is a replica of the Tijuana-Tecate railway (which marked the beginning of Chinese migration in the 20th century), photos of the legendary Casino de Agua Caliente, and a miniature plane like the ones produced towards the end of the 1920s.