Museo Soumaya

The Museo Soumaya is Carlos Slim's gift to Mexico City — a 46-metre-tall museum shaped like a warped silver anvil, covered in 16,000 hexagonal aluminium tiles, and housing the billionaire's private art collection of over 66,000 works. Admission is free (Slim is the richest person in Mexico and one of the richest in the world, and he pays for everything), and the collection spans six floors of European and Mexican art from the 15th century to the present.

The building, designed by Slim's son-in-law Fernando Romero, is love-it-or-hate-it architecture — the asymmetric form, clad in its shimmering hexagonal skin, has been compared to everything from a cloud to an hourglass to a metallic mushroom. The interior is equally unconventional: a spiralling ramp connects the floors, and the top-floor gallery, with its curved walls and diffused natural light, is one of the most unusual exhibition spaces in any museum.

The collection's strength is its breadth rather than its depth. The largest collection of Rodin sculptures outside France (380 pieces) is the headline act, but the galleries also contain works by Dalí, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Tintoretto, alongside Mexican colonial religious art and an extensive numismatic collection. The museum sits in the Plaza Carso development in Polanco, Mexico City's wealthiest neighbourhood, and the surrounding area — upscale restaurants, designer boutiques, and the city's best bookshops — provides context for the kind of wealth that builds a free museum as a personal project.