Tour Audio a Città del Messico

Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was built on an island in Lake Texcoco around 1325, according to the legend on the eagle perching on a cactus eating a serpent (now the Mexican national emblem). When Hernan Cortes and his forces took the city in 1521, they built Mexico City directly over it, using the rubble of the Aztec temples to build the Metropolitan Cathedral on the exact site of the main ceremonial precinct. The cathedral took 240 years to complete (1571 to 1813). Its foundations have been sinking unevenly into the old lakebed since it was finished, and the baroque towers now lean visibly at different angles.

Alexander von Humboldt visited in 1803 and called it the City of Palaces.

The designation still fits parts of the historic center, where colonial palaces and government buildings line the streets around the Zocalo, which is one of the largest public squares in the world and has been the city's civic heart since Aztec times. Diego Rivera's murals inside the National Palace, painted between 1929 and 1951, depict the full sweep of Mexican history from pre-Columbian civilization to the then-present. They remain among the most ambitious public artworks in the Americas.