Central Mexico City Travel Guide

The beating heart of Mexico City pumps strongest around the Zócalo, built by the Spanish right over the devastated ceremonial centre of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán. Extraordinary uncovered ruins - chief of which is the Templo Mayor - provide the Zócalo's most compelling lure, but there's also a wealth of great colonial buildings, among them the huge Cathedral and the Palacio Nacional with its striking Diego Rivera murals . You could easily spend a couple of days in the tightly packed blocks hereabouts, investigating the dense concentration of museums and galleries, especially notable for more works by Rivera and his "Big Three" companions, David Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco.

West of the Zócalo the centro histórico stretches through the main commercial district past the Museo Nacional de Arte to the sky-scraping Torre Latinoamericana and the Palacio de las Bellas Artes with its gorgeous Art Deco interior. Both overlook the formal parkland of the Alameda , another focus for museums, principally the Mexican arts and crafts collection inside the Museo Franz Mayer , and the Museo Mural Rivera with his famed Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda . Further west, the Revolution monument heralds the more upmarket central suburbs, chiefly the Zona Rosa , long known for its plush shops and restaurants though now largely superseded by swanky Polanco and hipper Condesa .

As a backdrop to Mexico City's quite remarkable sightseeing is a diverse, dynamic street life unequalled in Latin America - people hawking goods from streetside stalls, performers enacting Aztec dances, healers offering smoke cures for a few pesos, organ grinders panhandling, and much more. There's tremendous art too, and not just in galleries, but everywhere you go. Murals adorn public buildings, abandoned churches are given over to contemporary installations, and even the Metro stations (Zócalo in particular) have free displays along the corridors of a standard you might pay to see elsewhere.