I Took My Kids to Mexico City for a Week—and Discovered a Side of the Capital I Never Would Have Seen Without Them

At Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, it’s easy to hurry past Rufino Tamayo’s 40-foot mural Dualidad, in which the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl battles the jaguar Tezcatlipoca—two gods locked in an eternal struggle between destruction and creation. Yet the mural is tucked away near the bathrooms, another masterpiece you might overlook on your way to see the museum’s main treasures.

Such is the promise of Mexico City—that vast labyrinth of wonder, an impossible city with no beginning and no end. You are always walking past one miracle on the way to another, caught between chaos and order, enveloped by what the acclaimed Mexican writer Juan Villoro calls vértigo horizontal. Even its greater metropolitan population, hovering somewhere between 20 and 25 million, leaves a margin of error larger than many cities. As a visitor, you dance in that margin, irrelevant yet somehow more alive than ever. Vive.

When I first came in 2016, I was inspired by its immensity. Like the Borgesian library, the city cannot be known, freeing you to wander through its textures, its tastes, its constant ferment. Before my trip was over, I already wanted to come back and discover the city all over again.

At first glance, Mexico City can seem designed for grown-ups: a sprawling, sophisticated capital of ambitious restaurants, late nights, and museums that can swallow entire days. Leaving young children at home seemed like the sensible choice.

Naturally, I did the opposite: my wife and I brought our two sons, Holt, 11, and Max, 8, from our home in Boston. I wanted to find out what would happen if I turned this unknowable metropolis over to them. Children, after all, can be great judges of a city’s life form. They poke it, slap it, climb on it. They are amazed by small things and unimpressed by big things. They will tell you if a park is alive. And if a park is not alive, they will make it alive. They can also be a great pain.

My children are very different creatures. Holt speaks some Spanish, inhales historical facts, and hates even a hint of spice. Max will eat almost anything but quickly tires of museums filled with old things. He loves to run and stage private galactic battles. Crucially, he can be bribed with ice cream. Knowing all this, I nevertheless planned our itinerary like a graduate seminar in Mexican history, revolution, ecology, and art: a dozen or so of the city’s more than 150 museums, interspersed with playgrounds. This was clearly too many museums. Max would revolt. Hopefully, ice cream would restore order.

We split our weeklong visit between two hotels. Our first was the Amsterdam by Viadora, an upscale apartment-hotel in the Condesa neighborhood offering giant two-bedroom accommodations. Its chic lobby had a grand piano and black-and-white photos Holt described as “the gallery of women flopping on horses.”

Condesa is dreamy. Cafés spill from every corner. Plants grow from every wall. Everyone has a dog. The neighborhood revolves around two lively parks: Parque México and Parque España. On our first day, our children, who are perhaps getting a bit old for playgrounds, settled into seesawing with new friends in a new language.

Indeed, despite the city’s intimidating size, everyone we encountered was friendly and tolerant of our mangled attempts at Spanish. But I could also feel the demographics changing. Compared with my last visit, I noticed many more English speakers. The week before we arrived, there was a protest against gentrification, which is causing housing prices to soar as wages remain stagnant. Can this city of upheaval and reinvention—which has weathered repeated earthquakes and water crises—remain a home for all?

For our first outing, we went to see lucha libre, Mexico’s beloved wrestling extravaganza. At Arena México’s family-friendly Sunday show, we watched high-flying matches between the técnicos (“good guys”) and rudos (“bad guys”). My kids were smitten with the pageantry, the flips and gyrations, the leaps from great heights. Holt rooted for the técnicos with gusto; Max was partial to the rudos. In the final match, Atlantis Jr., hero to all, triumphed alongside his amigos Esfinge and Neón. There was much rejoicing all around.

Afterward, as the crowd spilled into the night, our children bought luchador masks and reenacted complex wrestling moves in our apartment, flipping from bed to bed like maniacs.

The next day we jumped into an Uber, braved Mexico City’s soul-crushing traffic, and drove south to Xochimilco, where a network of canals is among the last remnants of the vast lakes that once covered the valley. Beginning in the 14th century, the Aztecs expanded the ingenious system of rectangular farms called chinampas. These supplied fresh food to the capital, Tenochtitlan, but most have disappeared over the centuries, as the city expanded and the lakes were drained.

While many visitors cruise the canals on colorful party boats, drinking copious amounts of beer while serenaded by mariachis, we booked an Airbnb experience, led by Paco Juárez and Marcos Ixin Cebada of Humedalia, a conservation organization. They are among a new wave of scientists and farmers trying to preserve this ancient form of agriculture. We boarded canoes and slid into a canal, floating past white egrets and green herons. “The city feels so far away,” said Max.

We helped plant sunflowers at a farm and ate a gorgeous lunch of traditional bean-filled tlacoyos and perhaps the freshest salad I’ve ever had, filled with leafy greens plucked steps from our table. Even Holt, who had refused salads his entire life, tried it. “Salad is good!” he exclaimed.

Long before coming to Mexico, both children were obsessed with the axolotl, a remarkable salamander native to the Valley of Mexico. It can regenerate limbs and tissue in its heart, spinal cord, and eyes. Today, few survive in Xochimilco’s polluted canals; most live in captivity. Near the end of our tour, Juárez revealed a live axolotl in a little tub of water. My children gasped, as if they had just seen the pope. Max grabbed my phone and took 300 photos. “Do you think he knows we exist?” he asked, transfixed by a creature that can regenerate its vital organs, but not its vanishing habitat—the homeless healer.

El Bosque de Chapultepec is an urban wonder—twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park and home to more than a dozen excellent museums and cultural spaces. Maribel, a guide with Journey Mexico, led us through the park, beginning at Castillo de Chapultepec, a rare royal palace in North America with views of the horizontal vertigo in every direction. Like the city itself, it embodies overlapping histories, cultures, and identities. The castle was commissioned by Spaniards in 1785 on a site sacred to the Aztecs, and later housed a military academy. During the Mexican-American War, legend has it, one cadet—not much older than Holt—draped himself in the Mexican flag and leapt to his death rather than surrender it to American troops.

Holt had questions: “Couldn’t they just grab the flag after he fell?”

Maribel was patient under such inquisition: “In Mexico, there is the story—and then there is the story behind the story.”

The castle was home to Emperor Maxidlian (whose name Max appreciated) until his execution (a fact Max did not appreciate). Later it was the summer home of dictator Porfirio Díaz, until the Mexican Revolution drove him from power. By this point, our heads were spinning. We were losing Max; he kept flopping all over me. The day was stumbling toward disaster. To soothe him, we bought ice cream and a fuzzy, squirty monkey toy that perched on his head and shot water from its tail. Max squirted me in the crotch. And there was much rejoicing.

Our spirits restored, we charged ahead to the Museo Nacional de Antropología, which is built around a massive courtyard with a concrete “canopy” titled El Paraguas (The Umbrella). You could spend days here. Maribel deftly ushered us through the vast histories of pre-Hispanic cultures. We admired the glowing jade death mask of the Mayan king Pakal the Great. Our kids were taken with ōllamalīztli, an ancient Aztec ballgame in which players used their hips, knees, and forearms to propel a rubber ball through stone hoops. “Winners were sacrificed to the gods as a reward,” Maribel said.

“Really?” said Max, incredulous that victory might lead to death. He paused. “Or is that the story behind the story?”

That evening, exhausted from so much history, we had tasty tacos at El Tizoncito, a corner taqueria and the alleged inventor of tacos al pastor. The kids dared each other with the hot sauces. Holt made it to level three; Max overplayed his hand and spent the next hour sweating out of his ears.

Wandering Condesa, we grabbed a dozen churros at Churrería El Moro and drifted into a courtyard in Parque México. In the gloaming, every corner of the park was in motion: students practiced capoeira; a father taught his son to juggle; children played soccer. The air vibrated with city life. Holt ran off to throw a ball for a dog; Max joined the soccer game. My wife and I nibbled our churros, smiling at the sheer luck of being alive in that moment.

Since both kids love graphic novels, I figured Mexican muralism might offer them a tempting entry point into the city’s history and culture. I’m fascinated by how murals ask us to move through stories in space and time; their width and scale turn viewing into a physical experience. To help us unpack them, Journey Mexico paired us with Jaime Gómez Rico, a mural specialist—though he was more accustomed to addressing scholars than children.

Undeterred, he escorted our kids through the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, home to the 1947 landmark Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central, a panorama that depicts four centuries of Mexican history through the park’s visitors—from swanky elites on leisurely strolls to an Indigenous family being shoved out by a policeman. The mural holds a hundred disparate moments in a single frame, revealing itself only as you move along its length. Holt was enthralled, following our guide from figure to figure, listening intently. Max sketched the mural’s central pair: Rivera as a boy beside La Catrina, a skeleton with a feathered serpent.

Then we entered the mural: we crossed the street to Alameda Central itself, the stately park in the city’s historic center. We strolled to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, a dazzling marble opera house and museum that houses some of the world’s greatest murals, including José Clemente Orozco’s Catharsis and Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe, a re-creation of his Rockefeller Center work that was destroyed after he refused to remove a portrait of Vladimir Lenin.

“There’s one more place I want to show you,” said Gómez Rico, taking us past the Zócalo, the city’s crowded main square; the Catedral Metropolitana; and the Aztec ruins of Templo Mayor. We arrived at the historic headquarters of the secretariat of public education, which now houses the Museo Vivo del Muralismo and over 235 fresco panels by Rivera. Along with works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Roberto Montenegro, and others, they chronicle Mexico’s workers, traditions, and revolutionary struggles. Our kids trailed the expert, eager to learn about the workers and the bourgeoisie, the weapons and the lies, the symbols and the triumphs—the story behind the story.

“It’s like the world’s greatest comic book,” Max said.

Midway through the trip, we switched to the St. Regis Mexico City, an exquisite tower of pampering. The staff treated the kids like kings, giving them a cookie-decorating kit and mini bathrobes. The breakfast spread was its own muralismo, a pageantry of delights—the green juice es exquisito. Every evening, our butler, Víctor, would saber a Champagne bottle. One night he presented me with the severed top in a box and said, “I hope you remember this moment forever.”

My wife and I managed to sneak out to Máximo, one of the city’s extraordinary restaurants, where we savored scallop aguachile and grilled pork loin with mole alcaparrado. Having claimed some pure adult time for ourselves, we owed the kids the same. We struck a deal: they would indulge us in one more weird museum, then choose an activity entirely for themselves. It was sensible diplomacy, and probably overdue.

We chose the sublime Museo del Cárcamo de Dolores, a subterranean hydrology tank that Rivera covered with a mural designed to be submerged. The work depicts water as the source of all life. Now drained to protect the mural, the tank has become a surreal temple of art and science, with ethereal music droning from a futuristic sound sculpture. Only a few of us stood inside, jaws agape. It was perhaps my favorite place on the trip.

The kids chose the Papalote Museo del Niño, a children’s museum with a giant hamster wheel, an operating room, and an axolotl exhibit with a fiberglass salamander that kids can mount like a bronco. But perhaps we had corrupted our kids with too many strange cultural collisions. Holt left melancholic—one foot still in childhood, the other stepping into the beautiful chaos of the universe.

Max was cheerful as always but harder to read. Was he enjoying any of this? Did he like sketching skeletons? Or was he simply bearing the chaos on our behalf? With children, the answer is often yes and no.

We spent our final morning in historic Coyoacán, where Mexico City contracts to a more intimate scale. The kids loved seeing both Frida Kahlo’s famous Casa Azul and Leon Trotsky’s less-famous home in exile, where he was assassinated. We ate lunch at the hilariously named La Casa de los Tacos Coyoacán, just off Jardín Centenario. A woman made tortillas on a griddle beside our table while we braved a plate of chapulines—fried grasshoppers. Max and Holt ate them without protest. Vive.

For our final compromise, we turned to the Museo del Juguete Antiguo México, a vintage-toy museum in the Doctores neighborhood. It is less a museum than the fever dream of architect Roberto Shimizu Kinoshita, who began his collection at age 10 and has since amassed more than 20,000 toys, including a waterfall of masks and doll heads and an entire room of Snoopy and Peanuts figures. The accumulation made my head hurt a bit, though perhaps this was due to the spray-paint fumes floating up from the street-art workshop downstairs. Or maybe I was finally succumbing to the vertigo.

Holt loved the place, but it left him with an impossible longing: to travel back in time and play with the toys when they were new. Max was less impressed, saying the gift shop was “janky” and filled with random junk.

Our family emerged bewildered. The pavement glistened after a late-afternoon downpour, reflecting the city back to us in fragments. The air felt thick with the promise of evening. Around us, traffic inched along. I heard the hiss of spray paint and the clatter of a taco cart across the street. A man and his dog floated past.

“Someday,” Max said, as if remembering a dream, “we should do this again.”

A version of this story first appeared in the December 2026 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Vive La Vida.”

Read the original article on Travel & Leisure