The Museo Universitario Charcas occupies a colonial mansion on Calle Bolívar opposite the cathedral and is in fact three museums under one roof: colonial art, anthropology, and modern Bolivian painting. The collection was assembled by the University of San Francisco Xavier over a century from local donations and is unevenly catalogued but full of interesting things.
The colonial section is the strongest: a series of saints, virgins and martyrs in the Cuzco school style, complete with their gilded haloes and Andean angels in feathered tunics. The anthropology rooms display pre-Columbian ceramics, textiles and skulls including a number of trepanated examples — Andean surgeons were performing brain surgery centuries before Europeans figured out how to. The modern art wing has work by the 20th-century Bolivian master Arturo Borda, among others. A single ticket covers all three. The courtyard, with citrus trees and a stone well, is one of the prettiest in the city.