Visit Mexico City: An Independent City Guide

Start underground and work outwards. The Templo Mayor sits half-excavated beside the cathedral on the Zócalo, which is the point: the Spanish did not build near the Aztec capital, they built on top of it, and the two are stacked in one block you can walk in twenty minutes. Across the square the Palacio Nacional holds Diego Rivera's stairway mural of the whole of Mexican history — free, with a passport at the door, and closed more often than any other sight in this guide.

The two collections that decide the trip

The National Museum of Anthropology is the one visitor who dislikes museums still talks about afterwards: twelve ground-floor halls, one per culture, and the Sun Stone at the centre of the Mexica room. Two kilometres away up its own hill, Chapultepec Castle is the only castle in the Americas to have housed actual monarchs, and its terrace looks straight down Paseo de la Reforma. They sit at either end of the same park, and most people do them on one day — in this order, because the museum takes longer than anyone plans for.

South of the centre, and the day you give it

Coyoacán holds the Museo Frida Kahlo — the house she was born in and died in, MX$320 (about US$18.80), sold online only — and a market lunch that costs a tenth of that. Xochimilco is thirty minutes further south: the last working fragment of the Aztec lake, hired by the boat rather than the seat at an official MX$750 an hour (about US$44) for up to eighteen people. Two Aztec-era survivals, one afternoon, if you leave Coyoacán by two.

And the hour outside the city

Teotihuacán was a city of perhaps 125,000 people that was already a ruin when the Aztecs found it and gave it its name. It opens daily 08:00–17:00 with the last entry at 16:30, which makes it the rare major sight that is open on a Monday. Go on the first bus or the early-access tour; by eleven the Avenue of the Dead has no shade and no shortage of company.

Breakfast is late and long, lunch — la comida — lands between two and four and is the real meal of the day, and dinner is small and after eight. Restaurants that look empty at seven are not bad; they are simply on local time. If you have booked a table for 19:00 because that is when you eat at home, you will have the room to yourself.

Street food, and the only rule that matters

Choose a stall with a queue of people who work nearby and a comal that never goes cold. Tacos al pastor come off a vertical spit that has been turning since noon; a stand with no queue has meat that has been sitting. Carry small notes — MX$20 and MX$50 — because a taquero at eleven at night will not break MX$500, and almost nowhere on the street takes a card.

When a guided food tour is worth it

On a first visit, when the language and the sheer number of unfamiliar dishes are the barrier rather than the money. The Centro food tour with seven tastings and the market tour through La Merced and Sonora both end with you able to order alone for the rest of the week, which is the actual product. After that, the markets and taquerías cost a fraction of it.

Día de Muertos, 1–2 November. The cemeteries, the Zócalo installation and the parade the city invented after a James Bond film put one on screen. Rooms in Centro, Roma and Condesa are the most expensive of the year, and the Xochimilco boats run themed night trips. Book flights and rooms in spring, not in September.

El Grito, the night of 15 September. The president rings the bell on the Palacio Nacional balcony before a packed Zócalo at eleven. The square is closed off from the afternoon, the Centro museums shut early, and 16 September is a national holiday on which the INAH sites close.

Semana Santa, the week before Easter. Mexican families travel, so the city itself empties and the roads to Teotihuacán, Puebla and Tepoztlán fill. It is one of the best weeks of the year to have the Centro to yourself.

The rainy season, June to September. Not a date but a pattern: rain most afternoons, described in the chart below.

Arriving without a Casa Azul ticket. The museum states it plainly: no contamos con venta en taquilla — there is no ticket window. Every entry is bought online, for a named time, and summer weekends go days ahead. People still travel across the city to a closed door. Buy first, plan the day second.

Believing the free Sunday applies to you. It does not: since 1 January 2026 the Sunday exemption at INAH sites covers Mexican nationals and foreign residents. A visiting foreigner pays MX$210 and gets the busiest day of the week for the money.

Treating altitude as a rumour. The city sits at about 2,240 metres. The first day at altitude is where the headache, the shortened breath on the castle hill and the two-drink hangover come from. Slow the first afternoon, drink more water than feels sensible, and leave the climb at Teotihuacán for day two or three.

Planning the wrong day around the rain. From June to September it rains on roughly two days in three, and it does it after four in the afternoon. Museums in the morning, markets at midday, and something indoors at five is not a rainy-day plan, it is the plan.

Hailing a taxi in the street. The advice from every consular source and every resident is the same: use an app, or the sitio ranks with a phone number. The safety page sets out what the US State Department's Level 2 advisory actually says about this city, which is less alarming and more specific than the internet's version of it.

The Metro is the fastest way across the centre and the cheapest urban transport in any large capital, and it is also where pickpocketing is reported most. Ride it outside the 07:00–09:00 and 18:00–20:00 crushes, keep a bag in front of you, and use the women-and-children carriages at the front if they suit you. The Metrobús runs in its own lane down Insurgentes and Reforma, which is why it beats a car on the same route.

A card called Movilidad Integrada, sold at station machines for about MX$15 plus your first top-up, covers the Metro, Metrobús, Cablebús and trolleybus. Buy one on arrival rather than queueing for single fares each time.

One honest note on sourcing: the city operators' own websites refused every request from us on 30 August 2026, so the fares above are their published 2026 tariffs as carried by the Mexican press, not figures we read on metro.cdmx.gob.mx ourselves. They are stable, they have not moved in years, and we will replace this note with a direct citation the moment the site answers. Getting around carries the detail.

The pattern is unusual: the sights are cheap and the restaurants can be as expensive as anywhere in Europe, so the spread between a careful day and a comfortable one is almost entirely food and taxis.

Two things are worth knowing before the arithmetic: tipping is expected at 10–15% in restaurants and is often not on the bill, and cash still rules on the street, in markets and at the Xochimilco embarcaderos, where a boat is MX$750 an hour whether there are two of you or eighteen. The full breakdown, with what a room costs by district, is on what Mexico City costs.

Monday. The Anthropology Museum, Chapultepec Castle, the Museo Frida Kahlo, the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Templo Mayor museum are all shut. What stays open: Teotihuacán, open daily 08:00–17:00, the Basílica de Guadalupe, 06:00 to 21:00 every day, the Museo Soumaya, free and open 365 days, and the streets of Coyoacán and Roma. Give Monday to the pyramids and the problem disappears.

Sunday. Every INAH museum and zone is free to Mexican nationals and foreign residents, which makes it the busiest day of the week at Anthropology and the castle; a foreign visitor pays the full MX$210 for the privilege of the crowd. The Palacio de Bellas Artes is the exception worth using — its museum is free on Sunday to everyone, at MX$95 saved. Sunday is also when Paseo de la Reforma closes to cars until 14:00 and the city cycles down the middle of it. The full closure calendar has the public holidays as well.

Centro Histórico puts you inside the sights and empties out after nine, which some people like and some do not. Roma Norte and Condesa are the tree-lined, restaurant-dense, walkable choice most first visits are happiest with, twenty minutes by Metrobús from the centre. Polanco is the expensive, quiet, safe-feeling one, next to Chapultepec and the Anthropology Museum. Coyoacán is a village inside the city, forty minutes out, and better as a day than as a base. The comparison with rates by district is on where to stay.

Every price, opening hour and closed day on this site comes from the venue's own website or the institution that sets the rule — INAH for the archaeological zones and federal museums, INBAL for Bellas Artes, the museum's own ticket shop for the Casa Azul — and each page prints the date those figures were read. Climate figures are computed from the Open-Meteo ERA5 reanalysis for 1995–2024, not copied from another guide. Where an official source refuses to state something — how long a visit takes, how busy a day is — we either say it is not stated or label the estimate as ours.

We are an independent guide, not a ticket seller and not the official site of any museum. Booking links to platforms earn us a commission at no extra cost to you; official ticket-office links never do, and they are always the first row of a ticket table. When a figure and a source disagree, the source wins and the page changes.