A high-altitude capital where pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern Mexico share the same afternoon.

Mexico City sits on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco, and it never quite stops admitting it. The Zócalo, one of the largest public squares in the world, holds a colonial cathedral built partly from stones pulled off the Templo Mayor the Spanish tore down beside it; Diego Rivera’s murals inside the National Palace narrate that whole collision of empires across a single staircase. A little further out, Chapultepec Castle looks over a park several times the size of Hyde Park, and the National Museum of Anthropology holds the Aztec Sun Stone and the full breadth of pre-Hispanic Mexico under one roof. None of it is staged for a visitor’s benefit; a Sunday in the Zócalo looks much the same whether or not anyone is watching. Teotihuacán, an hour outside the city and already an ancient ruin by the time the Aztecs found it, adds a civilization older again — its pyramids best seen from a hot-air balloon at sunrise, drifting the length of the Avenue of the Dead as the sun comes up.

The city’s twentieth century runs just as openly through its neighbourhoods. Coyoacán keeps Frida Kahlo’s cobalt-blue house much as she left it, a short walk from the plazas and cantinas that still set the borough’s slower pace; Xochimilco’s canals, the last working remnant of the Aztecs’ floating chinampa farms, carry trajinera boats and mariachi past chinampas still under cultivation. Lucha libre remains a genuine working sport rather than a show revived for visitors, and the markets — La Merced, the Mercado de Sonora with its witchcraft stalls among the spice sacks — feed the city the way they always have, tequila and mezcal’s differences argued out over a tasting rather than a lecture. Beyond the everyday city, the Cablebús glides over Iztapalapa’s rooftops on a cable car built to connect a hillside neighbourhood rather than to entertain a visitor, and the Grutas de Tolantongo’s thermal pools and cave waterfalls, a full day into the Hidalgo mountains, offer a Mexico entirely apart from the altitude and traffic of the capital. These selected experiences are ways into that range, chosen so a stay can hold Mexico City’s ancient foundations, its colonial core and its everyday, mural-covered modern life in the same trip.