Longer way home
Lavender jacarandas in bloom over Mexico City's Roma neighbourhood.

Photo: Ščenza

Mexico City, Mexico · North America

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.

Ščenza

By Ščenza

· updated · 5 min read

It’s 9:42 a.m. and I’m at a small counter on the Calle Tonalá in the Roma Norte neighbourhood of Mexico City, with a plate of chilaquiles verdes and a cup of café de olla (Mexican spiced coffee). The man making the chilaquiles is a sixty-year-old chef called Don Beto whose tortillas come from a small molino (corn mill) two blocks away. The salsa verde was made an hour ago. This is what I keep flying down to Mexico City for, and what fifteen years ago no one in the Western travel press was paying attention to.

Why I keep coming back

Mexico City — Ciudad de México, CDMX, Chilangos are what residents are called — is the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world (22 million in the metropolitan area). It sits at 2240 m altitude on the bed of a drained Aztec lake. It is the seat of one of the world’s most layered civilisations — Aztec, Spanish-colonial, post-revolutionary modern, and contemporary international metropolis, all visible within a 5-km walk of the Zócalo.

The food, in particular, has become one of the most exciting cuisines on earth. Mexican cooking was UNESCO-listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010, and the past decade in CDMX has seen a flowering of both reinterpreted traditional Mexican and refined contemporary Mexican cooking that has, in my view, made the city the most exciting food capital in the Western Hemisphere.

Where to base yourself

Roma Norte for the central neighbourhood-walking and the food. Tree-lined, early-20th-century mansion-and-apartment streets, dense with cafés and restaurants.

Condesa for an adjacent and similar feel, with the parks (Parque México and Parque España).

Coyoacán for the south, the Frida Kahlo neighbourhood, the slower-paced colonial-village feel inside the city.

Polanco for the upscale, business-district base with the best fine dining.

Avoid the Centro Histórico as a base for more than two nights — it’s the tourist core and noisy at night.

What to actually do

Visit the National Museum of Anthropology. One of the great museums on earth. The pre-Columbian collections — Aztec calendar stone, Olmec heads, the Mayan rooms — are extraordinary. Allow a full day.

Walk the historical centre. The Zócalo, the Templo Mayor (the excavated Aztec pyramid under the cathedral), the National Palace with its Diego Rivera murals, the Catedral Metropolitana. Half a day; a guided tour is useful for the Templo Mayor.

Visit Teotihuacán. The pyramids of the pre-Aztec civilisation, 50 km northeast of the city. The Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, the long Avenue of the Dead between them. Hot-air balloon rides at sunrise are popular and worthwhile.

Visit the Frida Kahlo Museum (La Casa Azul). The blue house in Coyoacán where Kahlo lived and worked. Book online weeks ahead.

Spend an afternoon in Xochimilco. The remnant of the Aztec lake-and-canal system, with the colourful trajinera boats. Hire a boat for a few hours; the proper local experience involves a mariachi band coming alongside in another boat.

Walk Roma and Condesa at evening. The 8 p.m.–11 p.m. evening rush of these neighbourhoods is the contemporary CDMX at its most pleasant.

Where to eat

A brief selection from a city of thousands of excellent places:

Pujol — The flagship contemporary Mexican; Enrique Olvera; the mole tasting menu. Reserve months ahead. Quintonil — The other top-tier contemporary Mexican; Jorge Vallejo. Contramar — The lunchtime seafood institution; tuna tostadas and grilled fish. El Califa de León — The Michelin-starred taco al pastor stand. Lardo (Condesa) — Modern Mexican-Mediterranean from chef Elena Reygadas. Tacos at El Vilsito (al pastor, late night, in Narvarte) — One of the city’s late-night institutions. Coffee at Almanegra, Quentin, or Buna 42. Pulqueria Las Duelistas (Centro) — Pulque, the fermented agave drink from the pre-Hispanic tradition. Mercado de la Merced or Mercado de San Juan for the working markets; the food halls there are excellent.

When to come

February through May — pleasant, dry, the jacarandas in bloom in March-April.

October and November — pleasant after the rains.

June–September is the rainy season — almost daily afternoon thunderstorms but otherwise fine.

Day of the Dead (late October–early November) is the city’s iconic celebration; book months ahead.

Practical notes

  • Visa: Most Western passports get 180 days visa-free.
  • Money: Mexican peso. Card universally; cash for street food.
  • Transport: The Metro is extensive and cheap; Uber works well. Avoid hailing taxis on the street — pre-booked or via app is safer.
  • Altitude: 2240 m. Take it slow on day one; alcohol hits harder.
  • Safety: The standard urban precautions, slightly elevated. Don’t show valuables; don’t walk in unfamiliar neighbourhoods at night. The well-trafficked tourist areas (Roma, Condesa, Polanco, Coyoacán, Centro Histórico) are reasonably safe.
  • Water: Don’t drink tap water; bottled or filtered. Most restaurants use filtered water for ice and washing produce.
  • Earthquakes: A real risk. The city is built on a former lakebed and amplifies seismic motion. Familiarise yourself with the building’s evacuation map.

A final thought

Mexico City is, in my view, the most underrated major capital in the Americas. The combination of pre-Columbian depth, Spanish colonial layering, contemporary modernist art and architecture (Luis Barragán’s houses; Casa Estudio of Diego and Frida), and one of the world’s most exciting current food scenes, makes a week here one of the most rewarding urban trips on the continent.

The city’s reputation issue — too big, too polluted, too dangerous — has been largely outdated since around 2015. Air quality has improved (though still not great); the central neighbourhoods are safer than most US large-city central districts; the food and design culture has flowered.

Stay in Roma. Eat for the entire week. Walk to Condesa. Spend a day at Teotihuacán. See one museum a day. Go to a market. Drink mezcal. Talk to chilangos. The city earns the affection it provokes and rewards repeat visits more than almost any other in the Americas.

If you only have a few days

8 ideal things to do in Mexico City

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

Just the list, on its own page →

From a Split boy’s notebook

The Split lens

What reminded me of home

Capital with a layered pre-conquest, colonial, and modern urban fabric. The CDMX Centro Histórico walking morning before the city wakes up has the same quality as Diocletian's Peristyle at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday — empty, ancient, briefly yours. Both cities reward early walking.

What Split could borrow

Mexico City's modern Mexican fine-dining (Pujol, Quintonil) reinvented a deep regional cuisine for a contemporary audience without abandoning its roots. Our young chefs at restaurants like Bokeria and Hvarska Vala are starting to do this for Dalmatian cuisine. The city and the region could be more deliberate about supporting them — chef residencies, ingredient-supply support, international promotion.

Filed undercitiesfoodmuseumshistoryneighborhoods

Who can take you

Tour operators & guides to try

A short, opinionated starter list — just my humble opinion. Verify before booking.

  • Context Travelspecialistwww.contexttravel.com →

    Context Travel's Mexico City program is one of their strongest — pre-Columbian Tenochtitlan walks with archaeologists, the Frida Kahlo + Diego Rivera walk with art historians, the Sunday Chapultepec walk with a city historian. Six-person cap; three-to-four-hour walks. Caveat: the Anthropology Museum is so dense that a single Context visit is sometimes not enough; budget a self-guided morning afterward to revisit the rooms.

  • Intrepid Travelsmall groupwww.intrepidtravel.com →

    Intrepid's Mexico City + central-Mexico itineraries treat the city as a 3–4 night chapter alongside Oaxaca, Puebla, or San Miguel de Allende. Group size 12–16. The city portion uses local Chilango guides which makes the cultural-context substantially better than imported guiding. Caveat: their food walks are competent but not as deep as the Mexico City food-specialist operators (Eat Mexico is the long-running food-walk specialist).

If you liked this, try these