8 ideal things to do in Mexico City

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked August 19, 2025

The Museo Nacional de Antropología
Bosque de ChapultepecA full day, and even that is rationing
Pedro Ramírez Vázquez set a single slender column in the courtyard, hung a concrete canopy the size of a city block off the top of it, and ran water down the shaft, so you are already outmatched before you enter a gallery. Twenty-three halls. The Sun Stone. The Olmec heads. Do not attempt the lot. I tried it on my first visit, came out at closing with a headache and no recollection whatsoever of the Maya rooms, and have taken one wing per visit ever since.
Templo Mayor and its museum
Behind the cathedral, off the ZócaloMorning, before the Centro heats up
Electricity workers digging behind the cathedral in 1978 struck a stone disc over three metres across showing the dismembered goddess Coyolxauhqui, and the city then took down a block of colonial buildings to reach what lay beneath. The Mexica rebuilt this temple seven times, each shell over the last, and you cross the excavation on raised walkways above the layers. The museum next to it holds seven thousand objects out of the dig. The cathedral leaning gently into the same soft lakebed is a separate and ongoing problem.
Teotihuacán
40 km northeast; about an hour by bus from Terminal del NorteBe at the gate for opening. There is no shade worth the name
Forty kilometres northeast of the city, an avenue four kilometres long and forty metres wide runs between two pyramids raised by people whose language and name for themselves nobody now knows. Climbing access to the pyramids has been altered more than once in recent years, so check on the day rather than turning up with expectations. The Temple of the Feathered Serpent, with its rows of stone serpent heads still carrying traces of paint, is the section most groups skip and the one I would defend hardest.
Museo Frida Kahlo, La Casa Azul
Corner of Londres and Allende, CoyoacánBook weeks ahead — entry is timed and it sells out
Twenty-five thousand people a month pass through a modest blue house on a Coyoacán corner, and the queue outside is regularly longer than the visit inside. What earns it: the studio, the wheelchair pulled up to an easel, the painted plaster corsets, and a mirror mounted under the bed canopy facing downwards, which explains the self-portraits more efficiently than any wall text has ever managed. Walk the Coyoacán plazas afterwards. They are the antidote to the crowd you just stood in.
A trajinera on the Xochimilco canals
Xochimilco, in the far south of the cityWeekday for quiet, Sunday for the party. They are different days out
What survives of the lake the Mexica farmed: roughly 170 kilometres of canals and the chinampas, artificial garden plots staked down into the lakebed, which is why the whole system is on the World Heritage list. You hire a flat-bottomed boat and a man with a pole. On a Sunday a mariachi band pulls alongside and opens negotiations. On a Tuesday you get herons, working farmers, and the theoretical possibility of an axolotl, of which a few hundred remain in the wild. I have looked on four trips and seen none.
Casa Luis Barragán
Calle General Francisco Ramírez, Miguel HidalgoAppointment only, in small groups. Book a long way out
You book ahead or you do not get in, the groups are kept small, and the house repays both conditions. From the street it is a grey wall with almost nothing on it. Inside, Barragán handles light the way a stage designer does: a staircase with no handrail, a window that converts a garden into a hung painting, pink and yellow planes doing things that should not work in a private home and do. It went onto the World Heritage list in 2004, and standing in that living room you stop arguing about whether it deserved it.
Lucha libre at Arena México
Colonia Doctores, near Cuauhtémoc metroFriday is the big card; Tuesday is cheaper and rowdier
Sixteen and a half thousand seats, purpose-built for wrestling in 1956, still the headquarters of CMLL. The wrestling is choreographed and nobody in the building is confused on that point — the crowd is the actual event, and the standard of improvised abuse coming off the rows behind me was well beyond what my Spanish could follow with a dictionary. Sit high enough to see the whole ring and low enough to hear that. And think twice before wearing a rudo's mask into the wrong section.
The third-floor murals at the Palacio de Bellas Artes
Centro Histórico, at the edge of the AlamedaClosed Mondays
Rivera painted this mural twice. The first version, at Rockefeller Center in 1933, was destroyed for including Lenin; he repainted it here the following year with Lenin still in it, which tells you most of what you need to know about the man. Orozco and Siqueiros are on the same floor, Tamayo one below. Downstairs, the theatre has a twenty-four-tonne Tiffany glass stage curtain showing the two volcanoes — but you only see that if you hold a ticket to something, which strikes me as a perfectly good excuse to buy one.

The long version

Mexico City: the high-altitude metropolis that took a decade to be discovered

Mexico City was, for a long time, written off by Western travellers as too big, too polluted, too dangerous. The decade since 2015 has rewritten that conversation. The city is now, by most measures, one of the best food capitals in the world.

Read the full essay →