Centro Cultural Metropolitano Quito

Just off Plaza Grande, this beautifully restored building houses the municipal library and lecture rooms, and hosts temporary art exhibitions. The location is rich in history: it is supposedly the site of one of Inca ruler Atahualpa’s palaces; a Jesuit school from 1597 to 1767; an army barracks after the expulsion of the Jesuits in the late 1700s; and, in 1809, the site at which royalist forces held a group of revolutionaries, before murdering them a year later (this event is remembered in the center's Museo Alberto Mena Caamaño).