Twice the size of Central Park, holding the castle, the anthropology museum, a zoo and several million weekend visitors.
At around 686 hectares across three sections, Chapultepec is the largest urban park in Latin America and roughly twice the size of Central Park. Something like 15 million people visit a year, most of them on Sundays.
The name and the water
Chapultepec is Nahuatl for grasshopper hill. The springs here supplied Tenochtitlan by aqueduct, and the hill was a retreat for Aztec rulers — there are carved reliefs of Moctezuma and his predecessors on the rock face, badly weathered and mostly ignored.
The ahuehuete cypresses in the park include some that are several centuries old; the largest, El Sargento, is over 500 years old and now dead but standing.
The first section
Where nearly everything is.
Castillo de Chapultepec on the hill. Museo Nacional de Antropología on the northern edge — the reason many people come to Mexico at all.
Museo de Arte Moderno, with Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas. Museo Rufino Tamayo, a brutalist building with the painter’s own collection of international modern art. Museo del Caracol, a spiral history museum below the castle.
The lake, with rowing boats. Chapultepec Zoo, free, where the first giant pandas born outside China were raised in the 1980s.
Los Pinos, the former presidential residence, opened to the public in 2018 and free.
The second and third sections
Larger, wilder and much less visited — woodland, running paths, the Papalote children’s museum, a large fountain complex and the Panteón Civil de Dolores, the city’s main cemetery, which holds the Rotonda de las Personas Ilustres.
The Cárcamo de Dolores in the second section is a waterworks chamber containing a Diego Rivera mural painted underwater — designed to be seen through flowing water, which damaged it, and now displayed drained. Outside is his Fuente de Tláloc, a vast mosaic rain god lying in a pool.
The masterplan
Since 2020 a major project, Bosque de Chapultepec: Naturaleza y Cultura, has been extending the park into a fourth section on former military land and adding a Calzada Flotante, an elevated walkway linking the sections across the roads that divide them.
It is under construction in phases; expect works.
Practicalities
Free to enter; museums are ticketed and mostly free for Mexicans on Sundays.
The park is closed on Mondays.
Sundays are extremely busy — food stalls, families, balloon sellers — and are also when museum entry is free for residents. It is a genuinely good day to see the park being used, and a bad one to see the museums quietly.
Altitude is 2,240 metres and the hill is a real climb.
More Parks & Outdoors
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The last surviving canals and floating gardens of the Aztec lake system, worked since before the conquest and now full of painted boats.
Viveros de Coyoacán
A working tree nursery that is also the city's favourite running track, full of squirrels and eucalyptus.