Condesa

La Condesa sits just west of Avenida Insurgentes and Colonia Roma, 4 to 5 km west of the Zócalo, in the Cuauhtémoc borough. It takes in three colonias, Condesa, Hipódromo and Hipódromo Condesa, and is named after the Countess of Miravalle, whose hacienda once covered Roma, Condesa and part of Tacubaya; her old manor house is now the Russian Embassy. The colonia was officially founded in 1902, and the Jockey Club's racetrack, opened by Porfirio Díaz in 1910, gave the area its most distinctive feature: when the track closed, its oval became Avenida Ámsterdam, which still loops around the neighbourhood with a shaded walking path down its median.

The infield of the old track was turned into Parque México in the 1920s, a nine-hectare park designed with winding paths, ponds with ducks, an Art Deco clock tower, the Fuente de los Cántaros and the Foro Lindbergh open-air theatre, and the houses and apartment blocks around it were built to match. That makes Hipódromo one of the best places in Mexico to see Art Deco, from the Edificio San Martín, restored in 1998–2001, to the curving Edificio Basurto of the late 1930s, the city's first Bauhaus-type apartment block. Nearby Parque España, opened in 1921 for the centenary of independence, has a small lake and a rustic concrete bridge. In the 1940s and 1950s film stars, the composer Agustín Lara and many Jewish and Spanish émigré families lived here.

The 1985 earthquake emptied many buildings, but from the 1990s artists and musicians moved back in, and today Condesa, together with Roma, is a city-designated Barrio Mágico known for cafés, bars, bookshops and dog walkers. Most of the bars and restaurants line Ámsterdam and Michoacán; the Fondo de Cultura Económica's Librería Rosario Castellanos on Tamaulipas is worth a look for its interior, and the 1946 Mercado Michoacán is a modernist market with food stalls. Weekends in Parque México bring bands, craft stalls and families, and it is an easy, flat area to explore on foot or by Ecobici.