Casa Na Bolom is one of the most unusual museums in Mexico, housed in a 19th-century house in the northern part of San Cristóbal. It was the home and working base of the archaeologist Frans Blom and his partner, the photographer and activist Gertrude Duby-Blom, who together made it a centre of research into the Maya highlands and the Lacandon rainforest to the east.
The house museum preserves their library, their collection of indigenous artefacts and textiles, and — most strikingly — Gertrude Duby-Blom's extraordinary photographic archive of the Lacandon Maya, which documented a culture that seemed to be in its final years. The house also contains a chapel, a lovely garden, and a library of some 10,000 volumes on Mesoamerica. Temporary exhibitions on Maya culture are mounted regularly.
The museum still functions as a small guesthouse, which gives it a warmth that most museums lack. Meals are served at long communal tables, the way the Bloms used to host visiting researchers. Even if you're not staying, the courtyard and garden are open and worth a quiet wander.