Explore Mexico City in Google Street View

Mexico City is built on a drained lake bed, and Street View shows the consequence more clearly than any statistic. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan sat on an island in Lake Texcoco; the Spanish drained the lake and built on the soft sediment left behind. That sediment is still compacting, groundwater is still being pumped out from under it, and parts of the city are sinking by several centimetres a year. Buildings in the historic centre visibly lean, doorways sit below pavement level, and the Metropolitan Cathedral has a pendulum inside it to monitor the tilt.

The Zócalo is one of the largest city squares in the world and is almost entirely empty, which is the point. It sits directly on top of the Aztec ceremonial precinct, and the Templo Mayor was found by accident in 1978 by electricity workers digging at the corner of it. The excavation is open at the north-east edge of the square, so you can stand on colonial paving and look down into the layer beneath.

Paseo de la Reforma is the axis that organises the modern city. Laid out in the 1860s on the model of European boulevards, it runs diagonally across the grid for kilometres, with a monument at each major roundabout and the towers getting taller as you go west. It is closed to cars on Sundays and given over to cyclists, and some of the imagery catches it that way, which is worth finding.

For the neighbourhoods, Roma Norte and Condesa are the ones to walk. Both were laid out in the early twentieth century with wide tree-lined streets and art nouveau and art deco houses, both were badly hit in the 1985 earthquake and again in 2017, and both have been repaired rather than replaced. Parque México in Condesa is an oval park that was a horse racing track, which is why the surrounding streets curve.

Coyoacán, to the south, was a separate village that the city grew around, and it still reads as one. The streets are cobbled, the houses are single storey and painted in strong colours, and the Casa Azul where Frida Kahlo lived and died is on a corner in the middle of it. This is the part of the city that feels least like a capital of twenty million people.

Xochimilco is the surviving fragment of the lake. A network of canals and artificial islands built for agriculture before the Spanish arrived, it is still farmed and still navigated by flat-bottomed boats, and parts of it were captured from the water. It is the only place left where you can see what the whole valley looked like before it was drained, which makes it the most historically useful thing in the city to open.