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Few capitals carry as much layered history as Mexico City, a metropolis of more than twenty million people sitting at roughly 2,240 metres above sea level in a high-altitude basin that was once the floor of Lake Texcoco. The Aztec city of Tenochtitlan rose here in the fourteenth century, was razed and rebuilt by Spanish colonisers in the sixteenth, and has been accumulating contradictions ever since: pre-Columbian ruins beneath colonial churches, Baroque palaces beside modernist murals, street markets operating in the shadow of glass towers. That density of time is not incidental to a visit; it is the visit.

The historic centre, the Centro Histórico, is where the oldest layers surface most dramatically. The Zócalo, one of the largest city squares in the world, is flanked by the Metropolitan Cathedral and the Palacio Nacional, whose Diego Rivera murals trace the full sweep of Mexican civilisation across hundreds of square metres of wall. Immediately adjacent, the Templo Mayor archaeological site sits at the precise ceremonial heart of Tenochtitlan, and a guided tour pairing it with the Museo Nacional de Antropología gives a coherent narrative thread across two of the city's most significant institutions. The anthropology museum, set in Chapultepec Park in the Polanco district, holds one of the great archaeological collections anywhere in the Americas, including the famous Aztec Sun Stone.