Mexico City, built on a drained lake

Mexico City sits at 2,240 metres in a basin that was once a chain of lakes, and it has never quite finished forgetting them: the cathedral leans, the pavements ripple, and the whole centre keeps settling slowly into the old lakebed. Start at the Zócalo, one of the largest squares in the world, where the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace face the excavated platforms of the Templo Mayor, found by accident in 1978 when electricity workers hit the carved disc of Coyolxauhqui two blocks from the altar; the museum behind it holds the offerings buried underneath. Walk west along Madero to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, its marble bulk visibly sunk a step below street level, with a Tiffany glass curtain inside and murals by Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco on the upper floors. In Chapultepec, the Museo Nacional de Antropología arranges the Sun Stone and the whole country's archaeology in a single circuit that will make every ruin you see afterwards legible; give it half a day and leave time to eat. And you should eat here. Tacos al pastor come off a vertical trompo brought by Lebanese migrants, quesadillas de huitlacoche from Mercado de San Juan, tlacoyos pressed on a comal at a corner in Roma, churros at three in the morning on Eje Central. Coyoacán keeps Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul and a market of tostadas piled past reason; Xochimilco keeps the last working canals of the lake, where painted trajineras are poled between chinampas still under cultivation. Teotihuacán lies an hour northeast, its Avenue of the Dead running two kilometres between pyramids raised centuries before the Mexica arrived and gave them their names. Come between November and April for dry, bright mornings, use the metro, and give the city more days than you think it needs.