Cerro de las Campanas

The Cerro de las Campanas (Hill of the Bells) is a hill and national park located in Querétaro City, Mexico. It is most noteworthy as the place where Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg and Generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía were executed, definitively ending the French intervention in Mexico. The mountain gets its name from rocks that, according to legend, make bell sounds when struck.

The hill on what was formerly the outskirts of Querétaro was the site of the end of the Second Mexican Empire. After being intercepted by the republican generals on May 15, 1867, Maximilian, who had been besieged in the central city of Querétaro since March, surrendered on the mountain to General Mariano Escobedo. He was jailed on the mountain along with his two generals: Miramón, who had been the president of Mexico for most of 1859 and 1860, and Mejía, a Querétaro-born cavalry general. After a court-martial in Querétaro in which all three were sentenced to death, the sentence was carried out atop the hill on June 19, 1867, when Maximilian, Miramón and Mejía were executed.

The site was initially marked with piles of stone topped by crosses made of sticks; later, wooden crosses were placed on the site, which are now housed in the Cerro de las Campanas Museum. In 1886, the first monument was constructed on the site: three stone columns engraved with the names of the deceased, surrounded by iron bars supported by wooden columns, commissioned by Governor Rafael Olvera ().

In 1900, after relations between Mexico and Austria resumed, the Maximilian Chapel (Capilla de Maximiliano) was constructed on the site. Commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph I in memory of his late brother and designed by architect Maximiliano Mitzel, the chapel was dedicated on April 10, 1901. It is designed in an eclectic Viennese style that "has nothing to do with Mexican buildings". The altar and altarpiece were made at the Querétaro School of Arts and Crafts, and the cross on the altar is taken from the Fragata Novara, the ship on which Maximilian and his wife Carlota arrived in Mexico and which transported his remains back to Austria.

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