Casa Bendaña is a rare surviving example of pre-earthquake Managua architecture — a late 19th-century merchant's house on the edge of the old city plaza that has been restored and now functions as a small museum and cultural centre. The building gives a glimpse of what the old city centre looked like before 1972: thick adobe walls, internal courtyard, heavy wooden doors, and the kind of domestic scale that the ruined neoclassical buildings around it lack.
The museum inside focuses on colonial-era Managua and the commercial history of the city. It is modest in scale and the displays are not sophisticated, but the building itself is worth seeing for the contrast with the ruins and monuments that surround it. The preservation of the house was a private initiative and represents a rare case of old Managua architecture being maintained rather than demolished or left to decay.