Things to do
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Chapultepec Castle
Crowning the hill above Chapultepec park, begun in 1785 as a viceregal retreat and later the home of the emperor Maximilian, a military academy, then the residence of presidents until 1939. It now holds the national history collection, along with Maximilian's roof garden and state carriage, and a terrace looking straight down the Paseo de la Reforma. The climb takes some twenty minutes. Shut on Mondays.
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Chapultepec Park
Ahuehuete cypresses, springs and a hill made this a retreat for Aztec rulers long before it became the city's lungs. Four sections now spread west from Reforma, holding the anthropology museum, the castle, a free zoo with pandas, lakes with rowing boats and open-air concerts. Sundays are family day and the paths fill. The first section shuts on Mondays for maintenance, which catches out museum visitors.
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Palacio de Bellas Artes
Marble outside, Art Deco within: a concert hall begun in 1904 and stalled by revolution until 1934, which left one architect's Art Nouveau shell around another's interior. Murals by Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros line the upper floors, and the stage curtain is a glass mosaic of the valley volcanoes made by Tiffany. The building has settled visibly into soft ground. Galleries close on Mondays.
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Anahuacalli Museum
Diego Rivera designed this dark temple of volcanic stone in the southern lava fields to house his collection of pre-Hispanic figures, tens of thousands of them. Narrow stairs climb through rooms with onyx windows to a roof terrace looking over the pedregal toward the volcanoes. A newer wing adds workshops and a garden of native plants. It sits a taxi ride from Coyoacán and closes on Mondays.
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Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Mexico's principal Marian shrine stands at the foot of Tepeyac hill, where an Indigenous convert is said to have gathered roses in his cloak in 1531. The cloak, bearing the image, hangs above the altar of a circular modern basilica, and a moving walkway carries the queue past it. The old church alongside tilts badly on sinking ground. The December pilgrimage brings millions and closes the district.
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Biblioteca Vasconcelos
Bookstacks hang in mid-air inside this public library beside Buenavista station, steel shelving suspended on several levels of a long glass hall. Gabriel Orozco's whale skeleton, covered in graphite lines, floats over the central atrium. A botanic garden wraps the building. Entry is free and open daily, with visitors free to wander the upper walkways.
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Casa Luis Barragán
From the street in Tacubaya the architect's home is a blank grey wall. Inside, tall plain rooms open onto a walled garden, a staircase climbs without a handrail, and the roof terrace is enclosed in pink and ochre planes cut against the sky. Entry is only by guided tour in small groups, booked ahead on the house's own ticket site, and children under ten are not admitted.
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Ciudad Universitaria
Juan O'Gorman wrapped the windowless Central Library in a stone mosaic of Mexican history, the image most associated with the national university's main campus, which carries a UNESCO listing. Siqueiros murals face the rectorate tower across the esplanade, and the Olympic stadium stands opposite the campus. The grounds are open to walk. Metrobús line 1 and metro line 3 both stop at the edge.
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Colonia Roma
Porfirian mansions with iron balconies and Art Nouveau facades line the tree-shaded avenues of Álvaro Obregón and Orizaba, now filled with galleries, bookshops, cafés and the Mercado de Medellín. The 1985 earthquake left gaps that newer buildings fill. Plaza Río de Janeiro, with its copy of Michelangelo's David, makes a central point. Roma Norte is flat, walkable and joins Condesa to the west.
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Coyoacán
Cortés made his base in this southern village after Tenochtitlan fell, and the cobbled streets, low painted walls and two linked plazas still read as somewhere apart from the capital. A coyote fountain marks the centre; the market sells tostadas piled to collapse. Trotsky was killed in a fortified house a few streets north, now a museum. Weekday mornings are quieter.
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Frida Kahlo Museum
The cobalt house in Coyoacán where Kahlo was born, lived with Rivera and died, kept much as she left it: the studio with a wheelchair drawn up to the easel, the painted plaster corsets, the bed with a mirror fixed above it. Rooms are small and the queue outside is long. Timed tickets are sold online only and go well ahead. Closed on Mondays.
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Gran Hotel Ciudad de México
A department store of 1899 on Avenida 16 de Septiembre, a block off the Zócalo, became this hotel, and the shop floor's Tiffany stained-glass ceiling still roofs the lobby. Open iron lift cages and curving balconies surround the atrium. Rooms are traditional in style. The rooftop terrace looks straight across the square to the cathedral and the National Palace.
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Hotel Geneve
Opened in 1907 on Calle Londres in Colonia Juárez, this hotel keeps its period lobby, wood-panelled bar and a glass-roofed hall with potted palms. Rooms are spread over several floors around the old core. The location sits between Reforma and Roma, within walking distance of the Angel of Independence and the Zona Rosa, and the metro at Insurgentes is close.
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Leon Trotsky House Museum
Watchtowers and bricked-up windows still guard the Coyoacán house where Trotsky lived in exile and was killed with an ice axe in 1940. The study is kept with his books, glasses and papers, and bullet holes from an earlier armed raid remain in the bedroom walls. His tomb stands in the garden among rabbit hutches. A short walk from the Frida Kahlo Museum; closed on Mondays.
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Mercado de la Merced
East of the Zócalo, the city's great wholesale market fills a modernist hall and spills across several blocks with dried chiles, piled fruit, piñatas, cooking pots and stalls serving huaraches and quesadillas. The neighbouring Sonora market sells herbs, ritual candles and charms. Mornings are the busiest trading hours. Carry small cash and keep to the main halls.
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Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral
Construction ran for close to two and a half centuries from 1573, which is why the building carries Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical work in one shell, some of it cut from the stones of the Aztec temple it replaced. The ground beneath is lakebed clay and the floor still tilts; engineers spent the nineteen nineties underpinning it. The gilded Altar of the Kings closes the far end.
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Monumento a la Revolución
Steel girders meant for a legislative palace were reused as this domed arch in the Tabacalera district, and the remains of revolutionary leaders now lie in its pillars. A glass lift climbs the inside to a viewing terrace under the copper dome, and the basement holds a museum of the Revolution. Fountains in the plaza below run with jets that children walk through on warm evenings.
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Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo
A pair of functionalist houses went up in San Ángel in 1932 to Juan O'Gorman's design, a large red one for Rivera and a smaller blue one for Kahlo, joined by a rooftop bridge. Rivera's double-height studio keeps his giant papier-mâché Judas figures, brushes and easel. The cactus fence and bare concrete were radical for the street. Closed on Mondays; the Saturday art market of San Ángel is a short walk.
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Museo Nacional de Arte
Behind Tolsá's bronze horseman on Calle Tacuba, a palace built for the communications ministry now holds Mexican painting from the colonial altarpieces to the early twentieth century. José María Velasco's wide views of the valley, before the city filled it, are the reason to climb to the upper floor. The staircase and gilded reception hall are as much a draw as the walls. Closed on Mondays.
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Museo Soumaya
Fernando Romero's windowless silver curve in Nuevo Polanco, clad in thousands of hexagonal aluminium tiles and opened in 2011, holds the collection of the Slim family. Rodin bronzes fill the skylit top floor, reached by a ramp that spirals up past European painting and Mexican colonial work. Entry is free and there is no ticket queue. The building divides opinion more than the art inside it.
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National Museum of Anthropology
Pedro Ramírez Vázquez's building of 1964 arranges the pre-Hispanic cultures around a courtyard shaded by one vast concrete canopy with water falling from its column. The Sun Stone, the Olmec heads and the jade mask from Palenque are here, with ethnography of living Indigenous cultures upstairs. Twelve ground-floor halls will absorb a whole day, so choose two or three regions and skip the rest.
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Palacio Nacional
Rivera's staircase mural is the reason to cross the Zócalo: a panorama of the country from Quetzalcoatl to the industrial age, painted through the nineteen thirties and continued along the upper corridor as a sequence of pre-conquest scenes. The building sits on Moctezuma's palace and houses the federal executive. Entry is free with photographic identification, and closures for state business come without much notice.
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Torre Latinoamericana
Glass and steel rise over the corner of Madero and Eje Central, a 1956 skyscraper built on piles in the soft lake clay that has ridden out the city's major earthquakes. Lifts carry ticket holders to an open observation deck near the top. From there the Zócalo, Bellas Artes and the grid of the centre spread below, with the volcanoes visible on clear winter days.
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Zócalo
Bare paving on a monumental scale fills the main square of the historic centre, laid over the ceremonial heart of Tenochtitlan and ringed by the cathedral, the National Palace and colonial arcades. Soldiers raise an outsize national flag at the middle each morning and lower it at dusk. Protests, concerts and temporary installations occupy the space for weeks at a time, so an empty square is never guaranteed.
