Veracruz keeps its culture in the open: coral-stone bastions turned galleries, a naval academy of maps and cannon, danzón in the plaza on Tuesday nights. Three days trace jarocho song, colonial architecture and a concrete concert hall at the Jamapa.
A 19th-century mansion at Zaragoza 397 telling the port's story from Totonac ceramics to the 1914 US landing, with a room on Afro-Caribbean roots. Tue-Sun 09:00-18:00; permanent halls plus rotating local shows.
The last standing bastion of the 1635 city wall, a squat coral-stone pentagon run by INAH. Inside sits Las Joyas del Pescador, pre-Hispanic gold jewellery dredged from the harbour by a fisherman in 1976. Tue-Sun 09:00-17:00.
An 18th-century royal shipyard warehouse of coral rock at Gómez Farías and Landero y Coss, restored by IVEC into a free exhibition hall for contemporary Veracruz painters, photographers and large installation work.
The state culture institute occupies the 18th-century Betlemita convent at Canal and Zaragoza. Its two cloister courtyards hold free galleries, evening recitals and a bookshop stocking small Veracruz presses.
Mexico's naval museum fills the former Naval Academy on Calle Arista, with fifteen halls of charts, rigged ship models, cannon raised from the harbour bed and the 1914 defence of the port. Tue-Sun 09:00-17:00.
The port's neoclassical playhouse on Emparan, named for the exiled Jesuit scholar, stages son jarocho ensembles, ballet folklórico and chamber concerts beneath a horseshoe of gilded balconies. Box office opens two hours before curtain.
The white bungalow where the composer of Solamente una vez lived, holding his piano, handwritten scores, dinner jackets and photographs. Staff play his boleros while you walk the four small rooms and the garden.
Michel Rojkind's 2017 concert hall at the mouth of the Jamapa river, a tumble of raw concrete blocks facing the breakwater, home to the Orquesta Filarmónica de Boca del Río. Lobby and roof terrace open on concert nights.
The 1880s iron-framed market on Cortés, stacked with Papantla vanilla pods, jarocho hammocks, cacao, dried chiles and herb stalls selling limpias. Work the fish aisle early, then eat picadas at the counters.
The old dockworkers' quarter of shared patios and one-storey vecindades south of the centre, cradle of Veracruz danzón and son. Murals line the Callejón de la Lagunilla, and carnival comparsas rehearse here from January.
The 1910 lighthouse and naval headquarters on the waterfront also holds the rooms where Carranza governed Mexico in 1915. Marble halls, period desks and facsimiles of the constitutional drafts fill the upper floor.
On Tuesday and Saturday evenings couples in guayaberas and heels fill the bandstand square for danzón, the Cuban-born ballroom form the port adopted in the 1880s. A live band plays; onlookers ring the paving.