Founded by the Mexica as Tenochtitlan around 1325, Mexico City is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the oldest capital in the Americas. It stands at 2,240 metres in the Valley of Mexico on the high central plateau, on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco. The 2020 census counted 9,209,944 people in the city proper, divided into 16 boroughs, and 21,804,515 in Greater Mexico City, which spills into the State of Mexico and Hidalgo, making it the most populous city in North America. What sets it apart is who built it: it is one of only two capitals in the Americas founded by Indigenous peoples, and five centuries of arrivals since, from Spanish conquerors to Lebanese traders and rural migrants, have each left a layer on top.
The Mexica, the Tlatelolca and a Map Still Written in Nahuatl
The Mexica, a Nahuatl-speaking people, reached the Valley of Mexico in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and settled on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325 or 1327. Their founding legend says the god Huitzilopochtli showed them the spot with a golden eagle perched on a prickly pear, devouring a rattlesnake, the image now on Mexico’s flag. In 1337 a dissident group broke away and founded Tlatelolco on the northern part of the same island. The two cities stayed tied together, and Tenochtitlan depended on Tlatelolco’s market, the largest in the region. Hernán Cortés wrote that 60,000 people came to buy and sell there every day, and his soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo recorded the Spaniards’ astonishment at its size and order.
Between 1325 and 1521 Tenochtitlan came to dominate the other city-states around the lake, and at its height the Aztec Empire reached from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. Its people moved by canoe and along wide causeways to the mainland, and they farmed on chinampas, artificial plots built up in the shallow lake. That landscape survives at Xochimilco, founded on the southern shore of Lake Xochimilco and an independent settlement until the twentieth century and a city borough since 1928. Its roughly 170 kilometres of canals, still plied by painted flat-bottomed boats called trajineras, were declared a World Heritage Site in 1987.
The Mexica language never left the map. Chapultepec, the hill where Aztec rulers kept a retreat and now one of the largest city parks in Mexico, Coyoacán, Iztapalapa and Tlatelolco are all Nahuatl names, as is Tepito, from teocali-tepiton, “small temple”. Nahuatl is still one of the Indigenous languages with the most speakers in the capital, alongside Otomi, Mixtec, Zapotec and Mazahua, all kept alive by people who moved here from other states in search of work. The empire as a whole, and the lakes it grew on, are mapped in our geography of the Aztec Empire.
Conquerors, Labourers and Interpreters After 1521
Cortés, landing at Veracruz and helped by many other Indigenous peoples, among them the Tlaxcalans, entered the city along the Iztapalapa causeway on 8 November 1519, where the ruler Moctezuma II met him. On the night of 30 June 1520, the Noche Triste, the Mexica drove the Spaniards out. Cortés regrouped in Tlaxcala and returned to besiege the city in May 1521. For three months it went short of food and water while smallpox spread through it, and the last ruler, Cuauhtémoc, surrendered in August. Tenochtitlan was practically razed.
The new city was built on the old plan by Indigenous hands. Spaniards kept the main square, the Zócalo, which had been the Mexica ceremonial centre, and laid out a grid around it called the traza, where they lived; Indigenous families lived outside it. The Franciscan friar Motolinía, who arrived in 1524, counted the building of the city among the plagues of the conquest, describing workers crushed by beams and falling from scaffolds amid crowds so dense the wide causeways could barely be crossed. Labour drafts continued for generations, including the desagüe, which compelled thousands of Indigenous workers over the colonial period to build works against the lake’s recurring floods. The city was named Ciudad de México officially from 1585.
Some of the most important colonial residents were go-betweens. On 6 January 1536 the Franciscans opened the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, the first European school of higher learning in the Americas and the first major school of interpreters and translators in the New World. Its Indigenous students helped Bernardino de Sahagún compile the twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, known as the Florentine Codex. At the other end of society, noble families who made fortunes elsewhere in New Spain spent them on palatial town houses, especially in the late eighteenth century, which is why Alexander von Humboldt called it the City of Palaces. The same main square was the scene of two major riots, in 1624 and 1692.
Traders of La Merced, Tepito and the Lebanese Diaspora
Commerce in the capital has had fixed addresses for centuries. Tepito, in the Cuauhtémoc borough, was a poor lakeside fishing community in early Aztec times whose people were barred from trading in the Tlatelolco market; it became a lodging place for merchants bringing goods to that market, and its open-air tianguis still takes up most of the neighbourhood. Estimates of its population range from 38,000 to 120,000, with about 10,000 more people coming in each day to sell. It is also known as the Barrio Bravo for its reputation for crime and counterfeit goods.
East of the Zócalo, La Merced has meant trade since the early colonial period, when merchants from across New Spain set up there. The district is named after the monastery of La Merced, founded in 1594, and in the 1860s a permanent market was built on the monastery grounds. For the first half of the twentieth century it was the wholesaler for the whole city, until the Central de Abasto opened in the 1980s. It remains the city’s largest traditional retail food market, and an unofficial street market spills out around its halls.
Many of the traders who reshaped the city came from abroad. The first Lebanese immigrants landed at Mexican ports from Beirut in 1892, when Lebanon was still under Ottoman rule, and roughly 100,000 Arabic speakers settled in Mexico in that period, many in the capital. In the 1930s they made up less than 5 percent of Mexico’s immigrants but accounted for half of all immigrant economic activity. Carlos Slim, ranked the world’s richest person by Forbes from 2010 to 2013, is of Lebanese descent. Their food changed the city too: tacos al pastor, cut from a vertical spit in taquerías across the capital, grew out of the lamb shawarma that Lebanese immigrants brought to central Mexico.
Exiles and Migrants: From 541,516 People in 1900 to 21.8 Million
In the twentieth century the capital took in two very different kinds of newcomer. The first were political exiles. After the Spanish Civil War, more than 25,000 Spanish refugees settled in Mexico between 1939 and 1942, largely under President Lázaro Cárdenas. Cárdenas had already created La Casa de España en México in 1938 to host exiled Spanish intellectuals; it later became El Colegio de México. The Catalan painter Remedios Varo was among the Spanish and Jewish exiles who worked in the city. Leon Trotsky was given asylum in Coyoacán, where he was murdered in 1940.
The second, far larger group came from the Mexican countryside. The city had about 541,516 people in 1900. Wealthier families moved west and south to Colonia Roma, Polanco and Anzures, while working-class districts spread east across the dry lakebed toward Iztapalapa and Tláhuac. From the 1960s, villagers escaping rural poverty poured in, occupying land on the edges and building huge informal settlements. Between 1960 and 1980 the city’s population more than doubled to nearly 9 million, and by 1980 half of Mexico’s industrial jobs were here.
The growth burst the city’s limits. Of the 21.8 million people in the metropolitan area in 2020, about 12.4 million lived in the State of Mexico, in municipalities such as Ecatepec de Morelos, with 1,645,352 residents, and Nezahualcóyotl, with 1,077,208, which have become major cities in their own right. Since the late 1980s decentralisation policies have slowed the pace, and the city proper had negative net migration between 1995 and 2000 as residents moved to the suburbs or to other states; our comparison of Tokyo’s and Mexico City’s metro areas puts that scale in context.
These residents also changed how the city is run. When the earthquake of 19 September 1985 struck at 7:19 in the morning and the government was paralysed, ordinary people organised their own rescues and rebuilt much of the lost housing. Residents won the right to elect their own head of government in 1997, and on 29 January 2016 the old Federal District was renamed Ciudad de México, CDMX, beginning a transition that gave it its own constitution and state-like autonomy. In the 2020 census, 2.03 percent of residents identified as Black or Afro-Mexican, one more thread in a population whose physical setting, from the volcano-ringed valley to the sinking lakebed, is laid out in our guide to Mexico City’s geography.
Quick Facts About Mexico City
- Country: Mexico
- Continent: North America (Central America)
- Country population: approximately 133.0 million
- Capital city status: Mexico City is the capital of Mexico, the seat of national government, and the location of foreign embassies, parliament, and the head of state's official residence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the capital of Mexico?
The capital of Mexico is Mexico City. Mexico City is the seat of national government, hosts most foreign embassies and consulates, and is typically where the head of state and parliament are located.
What continent is Mexico City in?
Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, is located in North America, in the Central America region. As Mexico's capital, Mexico City serves as the country's primary connection to the broader North American political, economic, and cultural sphere.
Why is Mexico City the capital of Mexico?
Mexico City was chosen as the capital of Mexico for reasons that typically combine geography, history, and politics. Capital city selections often reflect a desire for centrality (being accessible from across the country), historical importance (being a longstanding seat of government or culture), or neutrality (being acceptable to multiple regions or ethnic groups within the country). The specific reasons for Mexico City's designation are detailed in the city's history above.
What is Mexico City known for?
As the capital of Mexico, Mexico City is best known for housing the country's central government institutions — parliament, presidential or royal residences, supreme court, and key ministries. It is also typically a major cultural and economic center within Mexico, hosting national museums, embassies, and signature monuments. The introduction and history sections above provide detailed coverage of the city's specific notable institutions and landmarks.
Related Pages
- Mexico Country Guide — full geography, climate, economy, and culture overview
- Flag of Mexico — meaning, history, and design of Mexico's national flag