A Breath of Fresh Air

Hugh O’Shaughnessy looks beyond recent reports of smog to give a clearer view of Mexico City’s captivating cultures

Mexico City has been the capital of two distinct empires and in the interval between the two it was the seat of a viceroy. So at this, the democratic end of the millennium, it’s not surprising that the different varieties of surviving grandeur continue to thrill and delight us.

If you want to enjoy the history of the city in its context you can’t do better than settle into your lodgings and take a bus immediately to Teotihuacan, 31 miles from the capital, where the first great culture in the Valley of Mexico flourished 2,600 years ago, well before the Aztecs were thought of. At the huge site whose name means City of the Gods in the Nahuatl language there are enough pyramids and temples and citadels to set your head spinning. The Pyramid of the Sun is comparable in size to those in Egypt. And the trip will fix in your mind the fact that the Valley of Mexico, rivalling the Valley of the Nile, has been a seat of civilisation for a well over two millennia.

A lovely reminder of the variety of the Mexican heritage is the church of San Agustín Acolman, a convent founded by Christian missionaries in the mid 17th century which you can visit on the way back to town. Its quiet cloister is full of orange trees. Inside are carvings of angels and giant frescos of popes and cardinals and plates heaped with fruit and, for those who like that sort of thing, pig’s trotters.

Back in the city take the Metro to the Zócalo, the main square where the clash of cultures - and the power of nature - are visible to all. In one corner are the ruins of the Atzecs’ Great Temple where on special days the priests would have torn out the hearts of the sacrificial victims. For all the sacrifices, Montezuma’s empire crumbled very swiftly in front of Hernán Cortés and his handful of soldiers whose secret weapon was the horse, never before seen on the continent of America.

Beside it stand some of the greatest monuments to the Spanish empire. The cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption was 250 years in the building and with some harmony reflects styles of the host of architects who had a hand in its construction. Oliver Cromwell’s death was celebrated in it on 13 July 1659 with a Te Deum, high mass and litanies.

Diagonally across the Zócalo is the National Palace, which was the seat of the Spanish viceroys of New Spain. Today, it contains some of the best work of the 20th century Mexican muralists. It rests on the site of the palace that Cortés built for himself which was in its turn constructed on a place where Montezuma had his palace and garden.

But if by now you are tiring of the monumental but still in historical mood the Franz Mayer Museum on the Alameda is the place for you, handy if you are staying two hundred metres away in one of the city’s nicest hotels, the Hotel de Cortés, an old patio with friendly service, close to the centre of town and just beside the Hidalgo Metro station.

The Franz Mayer is the worthy Mexican equivalent of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Lodged in what was in colonial times a hospital for the poor, it gives a marvellous sense of the grandeur of life - for a few at least - in the times of the viceroyalty. The porcelain and silver, the pictures and the tapestries all attest to the fact that this city was a metropolis at a time when New York was an undistinguished collection of buildings with few amenities.

The museum was formed out of the collection of a German-born financier who assembled 9,000 objets d’art and thousand of tiles which, like the collection at the V&A, cannot all be displayed at one time.

The historic sights in the Mexican capital are virtually endless - the Anthropological Museum, the Palacio Iturbide, the water gardens of Xochimilco, San Angel, the Square of the Three Cultures...

A visit to a city as packed with interest as Mexico is nothing without a good guide book. The 1997 Blue Guide, written by John Collis and David M. Jones is magisterially excellent for those whose interests are mainly cultural. In smaller format is Sarah Cameron’s comprehensive Mexico and Central America Handbook, published by Footprint and updated every year with every sort of handy information that a traveller could want.

Mexico City, like Rio de Janeiro, is a wonderful Latin American city. Both have been the capitals of empires. Both, too, have been unjustly denigrated. Though neither city is a total oasis of calm and order, no-one who survives the unique mixture of violence and tawdriness of Miami should have any difficulty in enjoying either. There are days in the Mexican capital when the air pollution is worrying, but these are relatively few and it would be a delicate traveller indeed who suffered more than momentarily from the fumes.

Based in Mexico City making a television programme a few years ago, I spent a fortnight on the fortieth floor of a hotel and never was the visibility less than perfect, way out beyond the boundaries of one of the largest conurbations in the world.

Mexico is to be enjoyed, not worried about.

Hugh O’Shaughnessy is a journalist who specialises in Latin America.