A colonial village absorbed by the city, with cobbled streets, two squares, Frida Kahlo's house and the best tostadas in Mexico.
Coyoacán — “place of coyotes” in Nahuatl — was a lakeside town that predated the conquest and became Cortés’s base after Tenochtitlan fell, while the new capital was being built.
It stayed a separate village until the twentieth century, when the city grew around it, and it kept its cobbled streets, low colonial houses and two adjoining squares.
The plazas
Jardín Centenario with its coyote fountain, and Plaza Hidalgo beside it with the kiosk and the parish church of San Juan Bautista, from 1522 and one of the oldest churches in the Americas.
At weekends both fill with stalls, buskers, dancers, balloon sellers and an enormous number of people. It is one of the pleasantest places in Mexico City to sit with a coffee and watch.
The houses
Museo Frida Kahlo — the Casa Azul, where she was born and died. Book ahead.
Museo Casa de León Trotsky, fifteen minutes away on Río Churubusco. Trotsky lived here from 1939 after leaving the Casa Azul, and was assassinated in the study in August 1940 by Ramón Mercader with an ice axe. The rooms are as they were, the bullet holes from an earlier attempt — led by the painter Siqueiros — are in the bedroom wall, and Trotsky’s ashes are in the garden under a stone with a hammer and sickle.
Casa de Cortés on Plaza Hidalgo, now government offices.
The market
Mercado de Coyoacán, a covered market three minutes from the plazas, and the tostada counters in the middle of it are an institution — crab, ceviche, octopus, tinga, pata, piled onto a fried tortilla. Tostadas Coyoacán is the name people give.
Also churros at El Jarocho, a coffee chain founded here in 1953, where people queue on the street.
Around it
San Ángel, twenty minutes west, is the other colonial village — cobbled, wealthier, with the Bazar Sábado craft market on Saturdays, the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo (two separate houses joined by a bridge, by Juan O’Gorman, 1932), and the Museo de El Carmen with its mummified bodies in the crypt.
Ciudad Universitaria, the UNAM campus, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its 1950s modernist architecture — the Central Library is covered on all four sides by a Juan O’Gorman mosaic mural of natural stone, and the Espacio Escultórico is a ring of concrete monoliths on a lava field.
Practicalities
Metro Line 3 to Coyoacán or Viveros; both are a fifteen-minute walk and Viveros is the pleasanter approach through the park.
Weekends are very busy. The streets are cobbled and uneven.
