Mexico City:

Four Days That Were Never Going to Be Enough!!

February 2026



We spent four nights in Mexico City, based in the Centro Histórico at the Hotel Bellas Artes. It was our first time in the city and we tried to cover as much ground as we could without turning it into a sprint.

The obvious starting point was the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Chapultepec, and it lived up to everything we had read about it. It is one of the great museums of the world. Room after room is dedicated to a different pre-Hispanic civilisation — Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacán, Mexica, Zapotec, Mixtec — and the building itself is remarkable: a large modernist structure set around an open courtyard with a fountain that cascades from a single central column. We spent a full morning there and still did not see everything. The stone sculptures, jade masks, ceramic figures and funerary urns alone would take days to look at properly. 

We ate lunch at the museum café, outside, ordering  chapulines — grasshoppers, boiled then fried — which arrived in tacos alongside tacos al pastor. They tasted of something between prawns in shells  and Dorito’s, and were rather good. 

The museum gardens extended around the building with more sculptures, temples and some very large cacti. After the museum we walked over the road to Chapultepec park, which is a fun place to visit with a picturesque lake. Then a bus ride and back through Alameda Park, where musicians had started playing cumbia in the late afternoon.

In the evening we ate at Casa de Azulejos, the famous building on Madero whose exterior is entirely covered in blue and white Talavera tiles. We ended up in their informal restaurant rather than the main dining room, which was fine. Our waiter was the highlight of the evening. He spoke to us for a long time in Spanish about regional differences in the language — how people spoke differently in Mexico City compared to Oaxaca — and told us that his family history included conquistadores, which he mentioned without any particular weight, simply as a fact. We talked about the regional languages of Spain and the English north-south divide. He understood exactly what we meant.

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On our second day we went to Coyoacán. Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s home, was one of the best artists’ house museums we had visited anywhere. The number of visitors is capped per session so it never felt crowded, and the house felt genuinely lived-in rather than preserved behind barriers. You could see her bed with the mirror above it that her parents had fitted so she could carry on painting during her long recoveries. The easel was built specifically for her wheelchair. The medical corsets she painted to make them decorative rather than just functional were displayed in the studio. The yellow kitchen was vivid and warm. Her political books and photographs of Lenin, Stalin and Mao were arranged exactly as she had left them.

Around the corner, Trotsky’s house told a very different story. It felt more domestic than we expected — there were rabbit hutches in the garden and an ordinary open icebox in the kitchen — but the history was brutal. The internal doors had been reinforced like bank vaults after the first assassination attempt in 1940, when David Alfaro Siqueiros, the muralist and Diego Rivera’s comrade, arrived with twenty men in military uniforms and machine-gunned the bedroom. Trotsky and his wife survived by rolling under the bed. Later that year, Ramón Mercader, a Spaniard working for Soviet intelligence who had spent months gaining Trotsky’s trust, killed him with an ice axe in the study. The study is preserved exactly as it was: books, papers, a pen. The bullet holes in the bedroom wall are still visible.

Our third stop that day was the Museo Anahuacalli, Diego Rivera’s self-designed pyramid on the edge of the city. He built it from volcanic stone to house his collection of pre-Hispanic clay artefacts — around fifty-nine thousand pieces in total, of which roughly two thousand are on display. The building sits in the landscape like a temple and the roof terrace has great views over the city toward the volcanoes. The details are in the design of this temple, inside and out, it feels like a ‘folly’ for Rivera’s artistic style.

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The Zócalo was central to our third day. It is the largest city square in the Americas. Standing at the centre with the Metropolitan Cathedral on one side and the Palacio Nacional on another, you should be aware that beneath the square lay Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital that was dismantled by the Spanish after 1521 and built over. The Templo Mayor, the ceremonial centre of that city, was not rediscovered until 1978 when electricity workers found the Coyolxauhqui stone — a large carved disc depicting a dismembered goddess — while laying cables nearby. The excavation that followed has been one of the most significant in the Americas and is still ongoing.

The Templo Mayor was rebuilt seven times, each ruler encasing the previous structure within a new one so the pyramid grew with each reign. The carved eagles, frogs and serpents along the ceremonial banquettes were cosmological rather than decorative: each animal carried a specific meaning within the Aztec understanding of the world. The recently excavated Huey Tzompantli, the skull rack, confirmed on an enormous scale what Spanish accounts had described — ritual sacrifice was not peripheral to Aztec life but central to it. The Spanish dismantled the Templo Mayor and used its stones to build the Cathedral that stands directly beside it. The museum attached to the site was clear and well laid out.

In the afternoon we went to the Secretaría de Educación Pública to see Rivera’s murals. There were more than two hundred panels across three floors: Mexican history, labour, politics and identity painted on a vast scale. Miners, weavers, a banquet of billionaires, Frida Kahlo distributing rifles. 

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On Sunday morning we went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes to see Ballet Folklórico de México performed. The company who performed this was founded in 1952 with eight dancers and now puts fifty people on the stage. The Tiffany-glass curtain beautifully depicted the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl lit from behind in shifting colours. There were regional dances from across Mexico: women in huge yellow and pink skirts performing La Sandunga with flowers balanced on their heads, a blue skeleton with extravagantly flexible legs, two mariachi harpists competing with each other, a man trying and eventually managing to lasso the woman he was after. La Cucaracha brought the house down. The singing was as good as anything we had heard. We had bought gallery tickets, which worked perfectly well.

Then after coffee in the Palacio de Bellas Artes cafe, we visited the Museum de Bellas Artes, upstairs. There were sculpture and art galleries, and murals by Rivera and Siqueiros. These are what we had really come to see in the museum. Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads was a recreation of the mural destroyed at the Rockefeller Center after Nelson Rockefeller objected to Lenin’s face in it. Siqueiros’s New Democracy on the opposite wall is a very different kind of painting: foreshortened figures erupting toward you, painted with industrial materials, confrontational rather than explanatory. It was interesting to stand in front of the murals by Rivera and Siqueiros and contemplate their relationship with each other, with communism and with Trotsky. We considered the connection between art and politics presented here, and were sure there was nothing similar at home in England.