13 Best Sights in Mexico

Bold colors, lines, and innovative designs are among the most ubiquitous features of Mexico City architecture, and this modernist approach can in large part be traced to Luis Barragán, who lived and worked in this home—now designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site—from the year he built it (1947) until his death in 1988. The architect's singular aesthetic is apparent throughout the house: in the angular staircases, sharp angles, ample natural light, and bold colored accent walls. Visits are by self-guided or guided tours, both of which must be purchased by advance reservation. Book online, and keep in mind that tour slots open roughly a month in advance and sell out almost immediately, so plan accordingly. Tickets are also quite expensive, and it costs an extra 500 pesos for permission to take photos. Across the street from the house is a small, peaceful garden with chairs, a reflection pool, lush foliage, and restrooms---this serves as a waiting area before tours begin, although it's free and open to the public (as is the museum's excellent bookstore), and it's a pleasant spot to take a break. The easiest route to the house is via the pedestrian pathway and stairs that border the highway, leading from the Constituyentes Metro station.

From the house's original entrance on Calle Morelos (around the corner from the current museum entrance) with its forbidding high walls and turrets for armed guards, you get a sense of just how precarious life was for its final resident, León Trotsky, one of the most important figures of the Russian Revolution. Living in exile, Trotsky moved his family here in 1939 at the behest of his friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (who resided in Casa Azul, just a few blocks away). Less than a year later, he would be assassinated. The house and adjoining exhibit galleries make for an eerily fascinating glimpse of Trotsky's later life and death. As you walk through the house, which looks largely as it did the day of his death, you'll see bullet holes still in the walls from the first assassination attempt, in which the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was implicated. The rooms include his bedroom, his wife's study, the dining room and kitchen, and the study where assassin Ramón Mercader (a man of many aliases) drove a pickax into Trotsky's head. On his desk, cluttered with writing paraphernalia and an article he was revising in Russian, the calendar is open to that fateful day: August 20, 1940.

Originally built as a home in the 16th century, the "House of Tiles" only acquired the celebrated facade that lends it its name a century later when the material was likely introduced from the workshop of the Dominican friars in the nearby city of Puebla. The dazzling designs, along with the facade's iron balconies and bronze handrails, the latter imported from China, make it one of the most singular baroque structures in the city. The interior is also worth seeing for its Moorish patio, monumental staircase, and mural by Orozco. The building is currently occupied by Sanborns, a chain store and restaurant; if you have plenty of time (service is slow), this is a good place to stop for a meal—especially breakfast, when older men gather to read their newspapers around the snaking bar. There's also a store with a pharmacy, bakery, candy counter, and an ATM.

Just a few blocks from Casa Estudio Luis Barragán, you'll find the famed architect's final design project. This narrow, deep house looks modest from the street, but its light-pink facade hints at something interesting within. Indeed, a tour of this house that Barragán constructed in 1976, well after he'd retired professionally, reveals many of the trademark features that characterize his design approach: boldly colored walls, geometrically shaped windows that allow light to filter in at interesting angles, and a stunning back patio anchored by a jacaranda tree. There's also an almost miragelike indoor swimming pool. A visit here is a must for devotees of Barragán, but anyone with an interest in design will enjoy a tour. Because the occupants of the house still reside here (their son gives the tours), visiting does require a little effort: advance reservations are required (you must call or email), and tours are offered only twice a day on weekdays and once on Saturday morning.

You're welcome any time at the Casa Museo de Doña Conchita. The affable owner shows visitors photos of her venerable family—which she traces back six generations. See banknotes from the mining days, bloomers, shirts made by hand by the lady for her many children, and other memorabilia. If you speak Spanish, ask Doña Conchita to tell you about the ghosts that haunt her house, which is right on the square between the basketball court and la presidencia, or town hall.

Built by the renowned architect Antonio Rivas Mercado between 1893 and 1898, the recently restored Rivas Mercado House is among the finest freestanding homes in the city's central neighborhoods and one of the remaining reminders of the colonia Guerrero's heyday as one of the city's more fashionable districts. The house was also the childhood home of writer and intellectual Antonieta Rivas Mercado, a great cultural gatekeeper of early 20th-century Mexico. A contributor to the avant-garde Teatro Ulises and the now-legendary literary magazine Los Contemporáneos, Rivas Mercado died tragically in 1931 at age 30 by shooting herself on the altar at Notre Dame. The house is open for guided tours at 10 am and noon on weekends, which must be reserved via email.

One of the city's earliest colonial homes now serves as a cultural center. Its fully restored rooms are furnished with period antiques and a few well-chosen reproductions; original frescoes at the tops of the walls remain, and you can see patches of the painted "wallpaper" that once covered the walls, serving to simulate European trends in an environment where real wallpaper wouldn't adhere due to the humidity. There is a small coffee shop on-site, plus a gift shop selling products from Campeche. The Moorish courtyard is occasionally used as a space for exhibits and lectures. Activities occur here several evenings a week. Vivo Recuerdo, a musical/theater interpretation of Campeche's history, is presented Thursday through Sunday; Con Sabor a Chocolate, a chocolate-making demonstration, takes place on Friday and Saturday.

This 1681 mansion, which contains both a cultural center and Museo Casa del Risco, is one of the prettiest houses facing the Plaza San Jacinto. The huge 18th-century Risco Fountain—exploding with colorful porcelain tiles, shells, and mosaics—dominates the eastern wall of the enclosed courtyard. Inside, the upper galleries contain a splendid if slightly somber collection of 17th- and 18th-century European baroque and colonial Mexican paintings and furnishings, all donated by the house's last owner, statesman and politician Isidro Fabela, who died in 1964. Fabela also donated books and magazines to a small library behind the museum (by way of a lovely patio) that's open to the public. Events and rotating art exhibits are staged throughout the year.

Built in the early 20th century on land formerly owned by Emperor Maximillian, this site was home to Mexican presidents from 1934 until 2018. Since then, it has become a cultural space and museum open to the public

Built in the early 20th century by one of the Yucatán's wealthiest plantation owners, Fernando Carvajal Estrada, this eclectic mansion is a reminder of the city's heyday, when Campeche was the peninsula's only port. Local legend insists that the art nouveau staircase with Carrara marble steps and iron balustrade, built and delivered in one piece from Italy, was too big and had to be shipped back and redone. These days the mansion is filled with government offices—you'll have to stretch your imagination a bit to picture how it once was.

Although open only on weekends, this palatial former home of Emilio "El Indio Fernández"—one of the greatest directors in Mexican cinematic history—is well worth a visit any time of year, but is especially a must-see during the weeks around Día de Muertos, when its rooms and gardens abound with remarkably extensive and colorful ofrendas (altars). The fortresslike home, built in the 1940s of volcanic rock with a design influenced by prehistoric temples, is filled with movie memorabilia, and vendors sell crafts, food, and other goods in the house's tree-shaded front courtyard. There are also theatrical presentations and other events throughout the year, some with additional admission charges. 

Part of Carlos Slim's growing collection of cultural holdings that operate—always with free admission—under the aegis of Soumaya Museum, this classic late 19th-century Porfirian mansion was formerly owned by the late historian and art collector Guillermo Tovar de Teresa. The grand, if imposingly formal, home is filled with priceless antiques and artwork, including an important painting of Archangel San Rafael by noted religious painter Miguel Cabrera, fine porcelain and glassworks from both Europe and Spanish Colonial Mexico, and Tovar de Teresa's huge library of historic books. Walking amid the Oriental rugs, gilt-framed mirrors and paintings, and sweeping drapes give a nice sense of what it might have felt like to live in one of the city's grandest homes, but the real treat here is visiting the romantic, cloistered garden, with its huge ferns, flowering plants, and curving pathways—it's a peaceful little green treasure in the heart of a bustling neighborhood.

A visit to Yaxcopoil (yash-co-po-eel), a restored 17th-century hacienda 47 km (29 miles) north of Uxmal, makes a nice change of pace while touring area Maya sites. The main building, with its distinctive Moorish double arch at the entrance, has been used as a film set and is one of the best-known henequen plantation in the region. The great house's rooms—including library, kitchen, dining room, drawing room, and salons—are fitted with late-19th-century European furnishings. You can tour these, along with the chapel, the storerooms, and the machine room used in processing henequen. In the museum, you'll see pottery and other artifacts recovered from the still-unexplored Classic period Maya site for which the hacienda is named. Yaxcopoil has restored a one-room guesthouse (reserve online) for overnighters and will serve a continental breakfast and simple dinner of traditional tamales and horchata (rice-flavored drink) by prior arrangement.