Torre Latinoamericana

When it was finished in 1956 the accepted wisdom was that you could not build tall on the soft, water-saturated bed of Lake Texcoco. Augusto H. Álvarez's design floated the tower on a raft of concrete over more than 300 friction piles driven into the clay, with a steel frame designed to sway rather than resist. It was the tallest building in Latin America for a decade and, for a while, the tallest anywhere on ground this bad.

The engineering was tested almost immediately. The tower came through the 1957 earthquake undamaged, through the catastrophic 1985 earthquake — which flattened much of the centre and killed thousands — with no structural damage, and through 2017 again. That record is why the building is on this page at all: it is the single most persuasive object in the city about what the ground here is and what it does.

How tall it actually is

182 metres to the roof, 204 to the tip of the antenna, 44 floors above ground. It is no longer the tallest in the city — the Torre Reforma and others in the Reforma corridor overtook it — but it is the tallest thing standing in the middle of the historic centre, which is what makes the view from it the one worth paying for.

East is the Zócalo, the cathedral and the Palacio Nacional, laid out as a plan — the clearest way to understand how the colonial grid sits over the Mexica island. West is Alameda Central and the Reforma corridor with the modern towers. North is the endless low-rise city, and on a clear morning the two volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, over the eastern rim of the valley.

Straight down is the Palacio de Bellas Artes with its tiled dome, and this is the surprise: from up here the palace reads as a small object in a huge grey field, which is a truer picture of the city than the postcard. The other surprise is the scale — the valley floor is 60 kilometres across and the city fills it to the mountains in every direction. Nothing at street level prepares you for that.

Air quality decides how much of it you get. The clearest months are the rainy ones, June to September, when the afternoon storms wash the valley — go in the morning before the clouds build. The worst are the dry, still weeks of February to May, when the haze can close the volcanoes entirely; the season page has the pattern.

Open 09:00 to 22:00, every day of the year — including the Mondays when the museums close and the evenings when the Centro has otherwise run out of things to do.

A practical note: the lifts go to 37, where the ticket check is, and a second lift or the stairs take you up to the deck. Bags are checked. There is a café on the way, and it is priced for a tower.

The terrace café on the upper floor of the department store across Eje Central charges nothing to go up — you buy a coffee — and it is the source of the famous photograph of the Bellas Artes dome with the tower behind it. It is eight floors up rather than forty-four, so the composition is better and the geography is worse.

The rule of thumb: for the dome photograph, take the free terrace. For the city — the valley, the volcanoes, the grid — pay the MX$220 and go up the tower. Doing both in one afternoon takes about ninety minutes and costs the price of one deck ticket and one coffee, which is the answer most visitors want. The Bellas Artes page has the terrace detail.

Put it at the end of a Centro day: Zócalo and Templo Mayor in the morning, Bellas Artes after lunch, the free terrace for the dome at about six, and the tower deck as the lights come on. Nothing else in the centre stays open that late.

On a Monday, when the museums are shut, invert it: the tower and the Basílica are open, and the Monday page has the rest. Where the whole trip goes is on the independent Mexico City guide.