🗺️ Mexico City: Where to stay when you visit
Use our neighborhood guide to find the best base for your Mexico City trip, whether you’re looking for tourist comforts, walkable streets, top restaurants, or hidden gems.
If it’s your first time visiting Mexico City, there are a handful of neighborhoods that should be at the top of your list of places to stay.
This is an excerpt from our downloadable book, Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City, which is designed to work seamlessly on your phone, e-reader, tablet, or computer. Use it to plan your itinerary, and refer to it any time you need to when you’re in Mexico City.
🗺️ Where should you stay in Mexico City?
🌴 Condesa ⭐
☑️Condesa is a comfortable base if it’s your first time visiting Mexico City, especially if you don’t speak Spanish.
❌It can feel too gentrified and Americanized.
Quieter and less chaotic than Roma Norte to its east, Condesa is full of cafés and the home of some of our favorite restaurants and bars. There is even some terrific street food if you look past the tourist zones.
It’s a good choice for if you want a quiet base to explore the rest of a loud and chaotic city. It’s our top pick for visitors, especially on a first trip.
Condesa is really three separate neighborhoods—Colonia Condesa, Colonia Hipódromo, and Colonia Hipódromo Condesa—but they’re referred to as a single place called Condesa.
🏠 Roma Norte ⭐
☑️Roma Norte is full of leafy streets with gorgeous architecture.
❌Like Condesa and Polanco, Roma Norte is gentrified.
To us, Roma Norte is the perfect Mexico City neighborhood. It’s walkable, safe, and friendly, and home to some of the city’s best restaurants, bars, cafés, and street food.
If you’re looking for a risk-free, traditional local experience, Roma Norte is it. We love it so much that we made it our home.
🏛️ Centro
☑️Centro is home to many of the city’s best sights. It’s a logical starting point if you’re visiting the city for the first time.
❌Centro can be crowded and feel touristy.
Centro refers to the European-style center of Mexico City made up of the Centro Histórico and Alameda Central neighborhoods, plus a bit of the surrounding area.
It extends from the Zócalo (main square) in the east, past the Palacio de Bellas Artes ands the Alameda Central park in the center, and out to the Monumento a la Revolución (Monument of the Revolution) in the west.
An 💜 Eternal Spring subscription is a smart investment in your Mexico City experience. For just $7/month or $49/year, you get access to all of our paid content, plus our archive of more than 100 articles covering neighborhood walks, what to pack, safety considerations, and more.
The whole area is quite walkable, and you could spend days exploring its sights, restaurants, bars, and cafes.
🌸 Juarez and Reforma
☑️These neighborhoods are centrally located and less gentrified than Condesa and Roma Norte.
❌Busy Reforma, lined with skyscrapers, can feel overwhelming.
You’ll find Juarez, San Rafael, and Colonia Cuauhtémoc on either side of Paseo de la Reforma, west of Centro and north of Roma Norte.
These neighborhoods aren’t as gentrified as Condesa and Roma Norte, but they are catching up, with plenty of restaurants, some of the cities top cocktail bars, and many of the city’s biggest hotels. It’s also home to Zona Rosa, an LGTBQ-friendly community.
This area is most interesting on Sundays: That’s when Reforma closes its streets to car traffic so that walkers, joggers, bicyclists, and others can enjoy its monuments and fountains from a unique perspective.
You’ll also find Mexico City’s best art fair at the Jardín del Arte Sullivan on Sundays.
🍸 Roma Sur
☑️Roma Sur has walkable streets and great, inexpensive restaurants.
❌It’s a bit further away from most of the main tourist attractions than Roma Norte and Condesa.
If Condesa and Roma Norte are too gentrified for you, take a look at the busier, grittier, and smaller neighborhood to the south, Roma Sur. It’s light on sights, but full of incredible, authentic restaurants, bars, and street food.
It’s also the home of our favorite park, the enormous Jardín Ramón López Velarde, our favorite farmer’s market, Mercado El 100, our local market, the authentic and diverse Mercado Medellín, and our favorite bar, Café Tacobar del Sur.
🛍️ Polanco
☑️Polanco has lots of luxury shopping and upscale restaurants.
❌You’ll probably face long rides in traffic getting in and out of Polanco.
Upscale Polanco is full of expensive hotels, restaurants, and embassies, and one of Mexico City’s best museums, Museo Soumaya, is nearby. The neighborhood is even more Americanized and gentrified than Condesa, and is considered a sort of Beverly Hills of Mexico City.
It’s a bit remote, however, because it’s not served by the Metro and there is a traffic choke point separating the area from the rest of the city.
It’s worth seeing, but the long Uber rides to and from elsewhere in the city make Polanco less desirable as a base for visitors.
🐺 Coyoacán and San Ángel
☑️Coyoacán and San Ángel are both charming neighborhoods to explore.
❌These neighborhoods are quite far from most of the areas you’ll want to visit.
Geographically separated from most of the areas we recommend, Coyoacán and neighboring San Ángel are very much worth the 25- to 30-minute Uber ride to the south.
Both feature traditional markets, gorgeous parks, and wonderful restaurants, bars, cafés, and weekend art fairs.
Coyoacán is also home to one of Mexico City’s most popular sights, Museo Frida Kahlo, a museum dedicated to the country’s most famous artist that’s located in her former home, the walled Casa Azul (the Blue House).
San Ángel is home to two of our favorite restaurants, Oxa and San Ángel Inn. While we love these neighborhoods, but we don’t recommend staying in either because they’re so far from most of the places you’ll want to see.
📅 How long should you stay in Mexico City?
You can get a good feel for what makes Mexico City so special in 5 to 7 days. So we recommend that most first-time visitors try and spend the better part of a week here if possible.
That said, if you have more time for traveling, you could easily stay for two weeks or more without running out of things to do.
And, you can see quite a bit in a short time, if that’s all you have. Here’s what we did with friends who tacked a weekend with us onto a trip to Acapulco:
Need tips for booking a vacation rental?
We’ve made a few mistakes booking vacation rentals, and you can learn from our mistakes:
Roma Sur ⭐ not too far not too close. The bigger drawback than traffic for Polanco, in my humble opinion, is the price of everything…
Awesome! I went to all those places in my month there, and they are must-sees. Great post.
Since I was visiting from a country with no IKEA, I also had to spend an afternoon IKEA!