Mexico City is layered like an archaeological trench: Aztec basalt under colonial limestone under revolutionary muralism. Three days trace the city from Tenochtitlán's sacrificial altars to the bunker where Trotsky was murdered in 1940.
The Pyramid of the Sun (65m) and Avenue of the Dead, built 100 BCE–250 CE by a civilisation the Aztecs never met — they found it abandoned and named it 'place where gods were born'. Open 09:00–17:00, last entry 15:00.
On-site museum holding the jade-masked burial offerings, obsidian blades and the scale model beneath a glass floor showing the city at its 125,000-inhabitant peak. Includes the reconstructed Quetzalpapálotl Palace murals.
Discovered in 1978 when electricians hit the 8-tonne Coyolxauhqui disc, the excavation exposed seven superimposed pyramids, 1470 BCE–1521 CE. The museum's eight halls hold 7,000 offerings dredged from the foundation caches.
Aztec temple platforms, the 1609 Santiago church built with their stones, and 1960s housing blocks in one square. Cuauhtémoc surrendered here on 13 August 1521; the plaque calls it 'the painful birth of the mestizo nation'.
Maximilian and Carlota's imperial residence 1864–67, later the presidential palace until 1939. Holds O'Gorman's 'Retablo de la Independencia' mural and the carriage in which Juárez re-entered the capital in 1867.
Begun in 1910 as Porfirio Díaz's legislative palace, abandoned when the Revolution he triggered drove him out, and finished in 1938 as a mausoleum. Villa, Carranza, Madero, Calles and Cárdenas lie in its four piers.
Trotsky's fortified Coyoacán refuge from 1939 until Ramón Mercader drove an ice axe into his skull on 20 August 1940. The study sits exactly as it was; the garden walls still carry bullet holes from Siqueiros's failed May 1940 raid.
The 1749 Jesuit college where Mexican muralism began in 1922: Orozco's 'La Trinchera', Rivera's first fresco 'La Creación', and Siqueiros's 'Los Elementos' all on the original baroque staircases.
The last working fragment of the Aztec lake system: artificial farming islands staked with ahuejote willows since the 14th century, UNESCO-listed in 1987 and still producing vegetables for the city's markets.
The 1678 convent where General Anaya, out of ammunition on 20 August 1847, told the Americans 'if we had powder, you would not be here'. Now the museum of every foreign invasion of Mexico, 1825–1917.
Juan O'Gorman's 1932 functionalist twin houses in San Ángel — the first modern buildings in Latin America, linked by a rooftop bridge. Rivera's studio holds his Judas figures and the easel he worked at until 1957.
Cortés based his government here from 1521–24 while Tenochtitlán was being demolished; the arcaded building on the plaza's north side carries his name and the sixteenth-century Parroquia de San Juan Bautista faces it.