11 Best Sights in Mexico City, Mexico

Architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez's outstanding design provides the proper home for one of the finest archaeological collections in the world. Each salon on the museum's two floors displays artifacts from a particular geographic region or culture. The collection is so extensive that you could easily spend days here, and even that might be barely adequate.

The 12 ground-floor rooms treat pre-Hispanic cultures by region, in the Sala Teotihuacána, Sala Tolteca, Sala Oaxaca (Zapotec and Mixtec peoples), and so on. Objects both precious and pedestrian, including statuary, jewelry, weapons, figurines, and pottery, evoke the intriguing, complex, and frequently warring civilizations that peopled Mesoamerica for the 3,000 years preceding the Spanish invasion. Other highlights include a copy of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma's feathered headdress; a stela from Tula, near Mexico City; massive Olmec heads from Veracruz; and vivid reproductions of Mayan murals in a reconstructed temple. Be sure to see the magnificent reconstruction of the tomb of 7th-century Mayan ruler Pakal, which was discovered in the ruins of Palenque. The nine rooms on the upper floor contain faithful ethnographic displays of current indigenous peoples, using maps, photographs, household objects, folk art, clothing, and religious articles.

Explanatory labels have been updated throughout, some with English translations, and free tours are available at set times from Tuesday through Saturday.

One of Mexico City's most well-known architectural icons, Museo Soumaya houses the valuable art collection of billionaire philanthropist Carlos Slim, as well as visiting exhibitions. The museum's Plaza Carso branch sits just beyond the edge of Polanco and contains sculptures by Rodin and Dalí and paintings from old masters to modernists and impressionists, including works from the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, El Greco, Tintoretto, Monet, and Picasso. But there are also many Mexican artists represented, including Diego Rivera. Each floor of the museum has a different layout, and you walk along curving ramps (not unlike those in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City) to get from one floor to another. Designed by the Mexican architect Fernando Romero, Slim's son-in-law, the $70 million building has a shape some have likened to a silver cloud, and is covered by thousands of hexagonal aluminum tiles.

Within its modernist shell, the sleek Rufino Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum contains paintings by noted Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo as well as temporary exhibitions of international contemporary art. The selections from Tamayo's personal collection, which he donated to the Mexican people, form the basis for the museum's permanent collection and demonstrate his unerring eye for great art; he owned works by Picasso, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Francis Bacon, and Henry Moore. 

Of all the monumental structures in Mexico City's city center, there is probably none more iconic than the Palacio Bellas Arts, with its orange dome, its elaborate belle epoque facade, and its magnificent interior murals. Construction on this colossal white-marble opera house began in 1904 under the direction of the Europhilic dictator Porfirio Díaz. The striking structure is the work of Italian architect Adamo Boari, who also designed the city's post office; pre-Hispanic motifs trim the facade, which leans toward the opulence of the belle epoque while also curiously hinting at the pared-down art deco style that would take hold in the Mexican capital in just a few years. The beginning of the Revolution in 1910 brought construction to a halt and threw the country into economic turmoil for a decade. By the time construction commenced again, the political, economic, and aesthetic world of Mexico had changed dramatically, resulting in an interior clad in red, black, and pink marble quarried in Mexico (the white exterior is from Carrara, Italy) and clear, straight lines that complement the murals by the great Mexican triumvirate of Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera, which you can visit for a fee. There are interesting temporary art exhibitions as well, plus an elegant cafeteria and a bookshop with a great selection of art books and magazines.

Palacio Bellas Artes is also home to the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, the National Architecture Museum, Ballet Folklorico, the National Opera Company, and many other cultural offerings.

The center of government in Mexico City since the time of the Mexica (aka Aztecs), Palacio Nacional's long, volcanic stone facade is both a symbol of political power and a staging ground for acts of resistance. Construction of the national palace was initiated by Cortés on the site of Moctezuma II's royal residence and remodeled by the viceroys. Its current form dates from 1693, although its third floor was added in 1926. If it's open to the public, the entire building is worth a look, even just for the novel experience of wandering freely through an influential nation's primary seat of government, but most visitors come for Diego Rivera's sweeping murals on the second floor of the main courtyard. For more than 20 years, starting in 1929, Rivera and his assistants mounted scaffolds day and night, perfecting techniques adapted from Renaissance Italy's frescoes. The result is nearly 1,200 square feet of vividly painted wall space, titled Epica del Pueblo Mexicano en su Lucha por la Libertad y la Independencia (Epic of the Mexican People in Their Struggle for Freedom and Independence). The paintings represent two millennia of Mexican history, filtered through Rivera's imagination; only a few vignettes acknowledge the more violent elements of some pre-Hispanic societies. As you walk around, you'll pass images of the savagery of the conquest and the hypocrisy of the Spanish priests, the noble independence movement, and the bloody revolution. Marx appears amid scenes of class struggle, toiling workers, industrialization (which Rivera idealized), bourgeois decadence, and nuclear holocaust. These are among Rivera's finest works—as well as the most accessible and probably the most visited. The palace also houses a minor museum that focuses on 19th-century president Benito Juárez and the Mexican Congress. Other exhibition spaces house rotating, and sometimes quite extraordinary, exhibitions, typically advertised on a large billboard in the Zócalo.

The liberty bell rung by Padre Hidalgo to proclaim independence in 1810 hangs high on the central facade. It chimes every eve of September 16, while from the balcony the president repeats "El Grito," the historic shout of independence, to throngs of citizens below.

The Palacio Nacional has historically been open to visitors, but the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrado changed this and private tours are currently not allowed. This is likely to change with the next presidential election in June 2024.

Mexico City's main post office building, designed by Italian architect Adamo Boari and Mexican engineer Gonzalo Garita, is a fine example of Renaissance Revival architecture. Constructed of cream-color sandstone from Teayo, Puebla, and Carrara, Italy, it epitomizes the grand Eurocentric architecture common in Mexico during the Porfiriato—the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). For many, it's one of Mexico's most splendid buildings. Tours in Spanish are available and can be booked on their website. 

The ruins of the sacred shrine of the Mexica (also commonly known as the Aztec) empire, built here in the 14th century, were unearthed accidentally in 1978 by telephone repairmen and the vast, 3-acre archaeological site has since become the old city's most compelling museum. At this temple, whose two twin shrines were dedicated to the sun god Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tláloc, captives from the empire's near-constant wars of conquest were sacrificed in rituals commemorated in carvings of skulls visible deep in the temple compound. The adjacent Museo del Templo Mayor contains thousands of pieces unearthed from the site and others across central Mexico, including ceramic warriors, stone carvings and knives, skulls of sacrificial victims, models and scale reproductions, and a room on the Spaniards' destruction of Tenochtitlán. The centerpiece is an 8-ton disk unearthed at the Templo Mayor depicting the dismembered moon goddess Coyolxauhqui.

The proximity between Templo Mayor and Catedral Metropolitana is no coincidence. When the Spanish conquistadors defeated the Mexica empire, they intentionally destroyed their places of worship, and used the stones from the temples to build churches.

One of the world's largest urban squares, Mexico City's Zócalo is the clearest expression of the city's immense importance as the capital of New Spain: a showpiece of colonial power and wealth and, after independence, a symbol for every element of Mexico's complex political identity.

Zócalo literally means "pedestal" or "base"; in the mid-19th century, an independence monument was planned for the square, but only the base was built. The term stuck, however, and now the word "zócalo" is applied to the main plazas in many Mexican cities. Mexico City's Zócalo (because it's the original, it's always capitalized) is used for government rallies, protests, sit-ins, and festive events. It's the focal point for Independence Day celebrations on the eve of September 16 and is a maze of lights, tinsel, and traders during the Christmas season. Flag-raising and -lowering ceremonies take place here in the early morning and late afternoon.

Formally called the Plaza de la Constitución, the enormous paved square, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, occupies the site of the ceremonial center of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Mexica empire, which once comprised 78 buildings. From the early 18th century until the mid-1900s, the plaza housed a market known as El Parián, specializing in luxury goods imported from Asia on the Manila Galleons, Spanish trading ships that crossed the Pacific from the Philippines to Acapulco. And while the Zócalo has seen the rise and fall of governments and movements for seven centuries, many of the rust-red facades that ring the plaza today—save for the first two floors of the emblematic Palacio Nacional and the Cathedral—were only added in the early 20th century, built in the neo-colonial style in fashion following the Revolution.

The Zócalo is the heart of Centro Histórico, and many of the neighborhood's sights are on the plaza's borders or just a few short blocks away. Even as the Mexican economy has gradually begun to centralize in recent years, the Zócalo remains the indisputable center of the nation.

The Modern Art Museum's permanent collection has many important examples of 20th-century Mexican art, including works by Mexican school painters like Frida Kahlo—her Las dos Fridas is possibly the most famous work in the collection—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Olga Costa. There are also pieces by surrealists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington.

This museum with a big gift shop (or shop with a small museum) and café features small expositions of contemporary Mexican design. The goals of the museum are to provide a space for design, to assist local designers, and to offer a location in which designers can make money from their craft. Exhibitions, open only through guided tours in Spanish every half hour from 10 am to 8 pm, are shown in a back room made of brick, where you can see the old archways from Cortés's patio, which was built, in part, on top of Moctezuma's pyramid. The shop is open to the public.