Mexico City

Mexico City is built directly on top of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that Hernán Cortés's forces destroyed in 1521. For centuries the temple complex at its center was assumed lost until 1978, when utility workers digging near the cathedral struck a massive carved stone disc depicting the dismembered goddess Coyolxauhqui — the find that led to the excavation of Templo Mayor, now a functioning archaeological site a short walk from the modern Zócalo.

That layering of eras defines the historic center: colonial cathedrals, Aztec ruins, and 20th-century government buildings occupy the same few blocks, often without much separation between them.

Outside the center, the city's scale becomes more apparent. Chapultepec Park covers more ground than New York's Central Park and holds several of the city's best museums within it, including the Museo Nacional de Antropología, whose collection of Aztec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican artifacts is considered among the finest anthropology collections anywhere.

Roma and Condesa, adjoining neighborhoods of early-20th-century architecture and tree-lined streets, have become the city's center of gravity for restaurants, cafés, and nightlife — a shift driven partly by a wave of foreign remote workers over the past several years, which has pushed up prices in these specific areas even as much of the rest of the city remains considerably cheaper.

South of the center, Xochimilco preserves a fragment of the canal and chinampa system the Aztecs used to farm on reclaimed lake beds — visitors ride flat-bottomed trajinera boats, often with mariachi or marimba bands paddling alongside to play for tips, through one of the last working remnants of pre-Hispanic Mexico City's original geography.