Mexico City: which types it suits

Mexico City is vast, dense and never quite quiet. The heavyweight sights are everywhere — the Zócalo, the Templo Mayor, the National Museum of Anthropology — and the gaps between them are filled with taco stands, market stalls and a cart on nearly every corner. The city sits at high altitude, so take the first day slowly.

It suits travellers who feed on crowds and noise and trust what they can smell over what they scheduled. Drifting through the tree-lined streets of Roma and Condesa into whichever café looks right, or joining the cyclists who take over Paseo de la Reforma on Sunday mornings, is the city at its best. The traffic is the counterweight: anything that crosses town takes far longer than the map suggests, so the smartest days stay inside one district.