Casa de los Azulejos

The Casa de los Azulejos, the House of Tiles, is the palace of the Counts of the Valle de Orizaba, on pedestrian Madero street at the corner of Callejón de la Condesa, a block from Eje Central. It grew out of two 16th-century houses that ended up in the same family through marriage, and it owes its famous skin to a later heiress, Graciana Suárez de Peredo. After years in Puebla she came back to the capital, and in 1737 she had the facade covered in blue-and-white Puebla tiles, with carved stone around the arches, balconies and cornices by Diego Durán Berruecos. In the 18th century people called it the Palacio Azul. The north side was cut back when 5 de Mayo street was opened in the late 19th century, and the new facade was tiled to match.

The family sold the house in 1871, and over the next decades it saw a lot of history. From 1881 it housed the Jockey Club, the most exclusive gathering place of the Porfirian elite; during the Revolution part of it briefly served the Casa del Obrero Mundial labor organization, and Zapatista troops occupied it for a time. In 1917 the brothers Walter and Frank Sanborn, who ran an American-style pharmacy and soda fountain nearby, rented it, put a stained-glass roof over the courtyard and opened in 1919 with a restaurant, shop and tobacco counter. It was declared a national monument in 1931, and Sanborns later bought the building.

That is why you can walk straight in from the street without a ticket. The covered courtyard, with its slim fluted columns, Moorish-tinged arcades and old fountain, is now the main dining room, framed by a peacock mural painted for the Sanborns in 1919. On the main staircase, walled with tiles, is Omnisciencia, an early mural that José Clemente Orozco painted in 1925, with the family's tiled coat of arms just below. Upstairs, the restored Jockey Club salon and a bar with balconies over the street are quieter than the busy restaurant below.