Centro Histórico

The Centro Histórico is the old heart of Mexico City, laid directly over the island city of Tenochtitlan. The protected zone covers about 9.7 square kilometres and 668 blocks, and of its roughly 9,000 buildings around 1,500 are catalogued as historic, from churches and convents to viceregal palaces and early 20th-century department stores. A presidential decree created the Zona de Monumentos Históricos on 11 April 1980, and on 11 December 1987 UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List together with the canals of Xochimilco.

Tenochtitlan's streets and canals ran along the cardinal directions, and when Alonso García Bravo drew up the Spanish town after 1521 he kept much of that grid, building with stone taken from the ruined Aztec city. Silver and trade money in the 17th and 18th centuries paid for mansions such as the Palace of Iturbide and the Casa de los Azulejos, whose Puebla tiles were added in 1747. The 20th century was harder: rents frozen in the 1940s (until 1998) left landlords with no reason to maintain buildings, the 1985 earthquake damaged many more, and the district lost around 100,000 residents while street vendors filled the sidewalks.

The turnaround came in the early 2000s, when the city government and a foundation set up by Carlos Slim bought and restored buildings, buried cables, repaved streets in stone and added security cameras. Madero became a pedestrian street from the Zócalo to the Alameda, and today it is one of the busiest walks in the country. West of it stand the Torre Latinoamericana (182 m with its antenna, finished in 1956), the white marble Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Palacio Postal by Adamo Boari and the Alameda Central, a park laid out in 1592. To the north, scribes still set up their typewriters under the arcades of Plaza Santo Domingo, and a couple of blocks of Calle Dolores form the city's small Barrio Chino.

Most visitors spend at least a full day here, walking between the Zócalo, the Templo Mayor, the cathedral and the Palacio Nacional, then out along Madero, Tacuba or Donceles. It is a working district as much as a monument: offices, markets and wholesale streets fill up on weekdays, and the old buildings lean visibly where the lakebed clay has settled under them.