Ciudad de Mexico

Mexico City was a pleasant surprise, and one we would never perhaps have seen were it not for the insistent lobbying of our friend and guide Luis, who loves and truly knows his home town. And what a "town" it is, 20 million souls living at 2,200 metres. While massive slums ring the metropolis and creep up along the mountains, there are many charming old neighborhoods (Juarez, Polanco, Condessa and Roma-- to name a few). Add to this 160 museums, many along the tree lined historic boulevard la Reforma and lovely Chapultepec Park, and you have (for those who can afford it) an urban lifestyle that rivals that of Paris and New York.

What is today central Mexico City was once covered by Lake Texcoco, where in the 14th Century the Aztecs founded a magnificent city of floating causeways, Tenochititlan, after seeing an eagle eating a snake while perched on a cactus growing from a rock (hence the image at the center of the Mexican flag). As with most construction based on prophesy, this may not have been an optimal site. Cortez tragically put an end to all that in 1519, but the intervening centuries have placed upon this historic heart a dense amalgam of pre-columbian, gothic, neoclassical, art deco and modern structures-- all slowly sinking into the muck.

Here are some highlights . . .

The impossibly intricate stonework of Mexico's first Franciscan monastery, which was confiscated by Benito Juarez in 1860, but later returned to Church hands.
The view from underneath a spiral staircase in the national Museum, the exterior of which is pictured below.
The courtyard of the "House of Tiles", the exterior of which is covered with lazuli-blue tiles in the Puebla Style, and which now houses a Sanborns restaurant.
The Palacio de Bellas Artes. The exterior (below) was completed just prior to the revolution of 1910, but completion of the interior had to wait more than 20 years. The cultural landscape of Mexico had been transformed in the interim, and nowhere is this more evident than in passing through the neoclassical front entrance into the art-deco interior, whose walls are covered with massive socialist murals by Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.
The main square of the old city is the 3rd largest in the world (after Tiananmen and Red Square) and is dominated by the Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de María, which took 200 years to complete. From the vantage point below, the national palace is situated orthogonally to the right, while the ruins of the Aztec Templo Mayor lie behind the oldest portion of the cathedral, far right.
The cathedral is both the largest and oldest in the Americas, and its vaults and porticos contain an impressive collection of religious art and artifacts, as well as this massive 18th century organ (one of two!) with a finely carved wood facade.