Museo Frida Kahlo:
view will unfold before you: the Palacio de Bellas Artes from above.
You may not eat especially well in the Casa de los Azulejos, but it’s worth a stop. The casa is a 400-year-old building covered with talavera tile work. Inside there’s a mediocre Sanborns restaurant with tremendous atmosphere — comfortable booths, high ceilings and a great sense of theater. Climb the stairs to take pictures from above, and notice the uneven floors.
I combined my visit with a long walk on Avenida Francisco I. Madero, the pedestrian artery that runs between the Zocalo and Eje Central Lazaro Cardenas. It’s great people-watching — better than the Zocalo.
You can’t miss the Metropolitan Cathedral — it faces the Zocalo and it’s big, important and vulnerable. When the Spanish showed up in the 16th century and conquered the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, they wanted to make clear they had taken charge. So they started building a cathedral, using native people as slave labor, on the site of the Aztecs’ central temple. As Spain’s ambitions grew, the work continued, on and off, until the early 19th century.
The result is the oldest and biggest cathedral in the Americas, packed with art and gold leaf. But the building is uneven, the result of centuries of earthquakes and the shrinking of the underwater lake beneath Mexico City.
Pace the gently sloping floor and consider the magnitude 8.0 quake that killed thousands on Sept. 19, 1985, and the magnitude 7.1 temblor that arrived 32 years later to the day — killing more than 350 people. As you circulate, you’ll pass five altars and 16 chapels.
To learn about what came before the cathedral, proceed to the Templo Mayor archaeological site and museum one block north of the Zocalo and the cathedral. Many of the ruins were uncovered in the 1970s, and