The Most Typical Things in Mexico City

The Zócalo is one of the largest city squares in the world, and it is built directly on the ceremonial centre of Tenochtitlan. The Spanish demolished the Aztec temples and used the stone for the cathedral, which is why the cathedral is slightly crooked: the ground beneath is soft lakebed and the whole city is sinking, unevenly, at a rate you can see in the doorframes.

Next to the cathedral, the Templo Mayor was rediscovered in 1978 when electricity workers digging a trench hit an eight-tonne carved disc of the moon goddess. The excavation that followed opened up the base of the main Aztec temple in the middle of the modern city, and the museum next to it holds what came out of the ground.

Nearby, the Palacio de Bellas Artes is a marble concert hall begun before the revolution and finished decades later, which is why the outside is art nouveau and the inside art deco. It is also sinking, visibly.

Plaza Garibaldi, north of the centre, is where mariachi bands gather in the evening waiting to be hired. You can pay a group to play a song at your table, which is what the plaza is for, and the price is negotiated per song before they start.

Mariachi is from Jalisco, not from Mexico City, but Garibaldi is where the country's musicians came to find work and it has been doing this for decades. Go in the evening, go with people, and be aware that the surrounding streets are best left alone late at night.

Tacos al pastor, pork marinated in chillies and achiote, stacked on a vertical spit with a pineapple on top and shaved off into small corn tortillas, are the emblematic taco of Mexico City. The technique came from Lebanese immigrants in the twentieth century who brought shawarma with them; the meat and the chillies made it Mexican.

Order them from a stand with a spit turning and a queue, ask for con todo (onion, coriander, pineapple), and take the salsa carefully the first time. Two or three is a snack, five is dinner.

Beyond tacos: tlacoyos from a griddle on the street, mole in a sit-down restaurant, and churros with thick chocolate late at night. Street food here is generally safe if the stand is busy and the food is cooked in front of you.

Both are agave spirits. Tequila comes from a single species of agave grown mainly around the town of Tequila in Jalisco; mezcal can be made from many agave species across several states, most famously Oaxaca, and is usually smokier because the agave hearts are roasted in earth pits.

The local way to drink either is neat, in small sips, with orange slices and a chilli-salt mix on the side, not as a shot with lime and salt, which is a foreign invention. Pulque, the fermented agave drink that predates both, is thick and sour and served in a pulquería; try it once.

On 1 and 2 November, families build altars for their dead with photographs, marigolds, food the person liked, and sugar skulls. It is not a Mexican Halloween: the tone is affectionate and domestic rather than frightening, and the point is that the dead come back to visit.

One honest correction: the enormous parade through the centre of Mexico City is a recent invention. There was no such parade until 2016, when the city created one after a James Bond film opened with a fictional version of it. The parade is now real and enjoyable, but the tradition is the altars and the cemeteries, not the floats.

In Chapultepec park, and one of the great museums of the world. The Aztec Sun Stone is here, along with the Maya, Olmec, Zapotec and Teotihuacan collections. Give it half a day, not an hour.

A cobbled colonial village absorbed by the city, with markets, plazas and the Casa Azul, the blue house where Frida Kahlo was born and died. Tickets sell out weeks ahead and must be booked online; do not turn up hoping.

The surviving canals and chinampas, artificial farming islands, of the old lake system, in the south of the city and part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing. You hire a trajinera, a flat painted boat, by the hour, and it is a loud, cheerful, mostly local weekend activity rather than a quiet punt.

About fifty kilometres north-east, the enormous pre-Aztec city with the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. One thing to know: climbing the pyramids has been prohibited since 2020 to protect the structures. You can still walk the Avenue of the Dead, and hot-air balloon flights at dawn are a common alternative.

Mexico City is nowhere near the Caribbean. Cancún and the Riviera Maya are over 1,300 kilometres away, a two-hour flight. If you want both on one trip, plan them as separate destinations rather than day trips.

The historic centre, Roma, Condesa and Coyoacán are all genuinely walkable, and the layers are visible at street level: Aztec stone in a colonial wall, art deco above a taquería. A city game gives you a route with something to solve at each stop, which suits a centre where the interesting things are stacked rather than spread out.

A shape that works: the Zócalo and Templo Mayor in the morning, tacos for lunch, Bellas Artes and the centre in the afternoon, and Garibaldi or a mezcalería in the evening. If you want the morning to have a route, here is how our games work, and you can get in touch about organising one. Interested in great squares elsewhere? Our guide to the best squares in Seville covers the other side of the same colonial history.