The tallest building in Mexico City is Torre Mitikah, at 267 metres with 68 floors, completed in 2022. It stands in the Benito Juárez borough in the south of the city, and it took the record from Torre Reforma, a 246-metre tower on Paseo de la Reforma finished in 2016. Both are engineering answers to the same problem: Mexico City is built on the bed of a drained lake, in one of the most seismically dangerous urban settings in the world, and it is sinking.
Building on a Drained Lake
Tenochtitlan was founded on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325. The Spanish drained the lake system over the following centuries, and the modern city sits on the resulting bed — soft, water-saturated volcanic clay that can be tens of metres deep before competent ground is reached.
The clay amplifies seismic waves dramatically. Ground motion in the lakebed zone during an earthquake can be several times greater than on the firmer ground at the edges of the basin, and the soil's natural resonance period of around two seconds happens to match that of buildings of roughly 10 to 20 storeys.
That is why the 1985 earthquake, magnitude 8.0 with an epicentre 350 kilometres away on the Pacific coast, destroyed buildings in the middle of Mexico City while leaving the coast comparatively intact. It killed at least 5,000 people and possibly many more, and it rewrote the Mexican building code.
The City Is Sinking
Groundwater extraction from the aquifer beneath the clay has caused subsidence across the city for over a century. Parts of the centre have dropped more than 10 metres since 1900, and current rates in some districts run to 30 or 40 centimetres a year.
The effects are visible everywhere. The Palacio de Bellas Artes, completed in 1934, has sunk several metres and its ground floor is now below the surrounding street. The Metropolitan Cathedral required a decade-long underexcavation programme in the 1990s to correct a lean of over two metres.
Tall buildings on deep piles sink more slowly than the ground around them, which produces the opposite problem: buildings that appear to rise out of the pavement as their surroundings drop. Foundation design in Mexico City has to account for differential settlement over decades, not just for loads.
Torre Mitikah
Torre Mitikah is a residential and mixed-use tower on the site of a former Cemex plant in Xoco, in the south of the city. It is part of a larger development including a shopping centre and a second tower, and it was designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli.
Its 267 metres put it about 20 metres above Torre Reforma. Its location outside the traditional Reforma corridor is significant: Mexico City's tall buildings had clustered along one avenue for fifty years, and Mitikah broke that pattern.
The project was heavily contested locally. Residents of Xoco, an old village absorbed by the city, fought the development through the courts for years on grounds including water supply, traffic and the demolition of existing housing, and construction was suspended more than once.
Torre Reforma and the Concrete Walls
Torre Reforma, by the Mexican architect Benjamín Romano, is the more interesting building structurally. It is triangular in plan, with two solid reinforced concrete walls forming the two street-facing sides and a glass curtain on the third, facing Chapultepec Park.
The concrete walls are up to a metre thick and carry both gravity and seismic loads, and they are perforated by openings that allow the walls to flex and dissipate energy during an earthquake rather than resisting it rigidly. The design was tested at scale and won the International Highrise Award in 2018.
The tower also had to preserve a 1920s house on its site, which was retained and integrated at the base. Its foundation reaches 60 metres down through the clay to a hard layer, using 21 piles and a diaphragm wall.
Torre Latinoamericana Survived 1957 and 1985
The Torre Latinoamericana, completed in 1956 at 182 metres, is the building that proved tall construction was possible in Mexico City. It was the tallest in Latin America when built, and it was engineered by Leonardo Zeevaert and Nabor Carrillo specifically for the lakebed conditions, on 361 piles driven 33 metres to a firm sand layer.
It came through the 1957 earthquake, magnitude 7.7, without structural damage — a year after opening. It came through 1985 undamaged as well, while buildings around it collapsed.
The American Institute of Steel Construction gave it an award in 1957 for being the tallest building ever exposed to a huge seismic force. It remains open, with an observation deck on the 44th floor that is the best-known viewpoint in the city.
What 1985 Changed
The 1985 earthquake destroyed or seriously damaged over 400 buildings, with the heaviest losses in the 6-to-15-storey range whose resonance matched the soil's. Buildings taller and shorter than that band fared much better.
Mexico's building code was substantially rewritten in 1987 and again in 2004 and 2017, with far stricter seismic provisions, mandatory soil-specific design, and requirements for structural review by independent engineers. The 2017 Puebla earthquake, magnitude 7.1, killed around 370 people — a tenth of the 1985 toll from a smaller but closer event, and the code is generally credited.
Mexico City also operates a public earthquake early warning system, SASMEX, which has been running since 1991 and gives the city up to a minute of warning for events on the Guerrero coast. Loudspeakers across the city broadcast the alert.
How You Found a Building on Jelly
Mexico City engineers use foundation types that are rare elsewhere. The classic solution is the compensated foundation: excavate a basement whose removed soil weighs roughly as much as the building above, so the net load on the clay is close to zero and settlement is minimised.
Where that is not enough, deep friction piles or point-bearing piles reach the firm sand layers, typically at 30 to 60 metres. Some buildings use control piles, an adjustable system invented in Mexico by Manuel González Flores that allows the load path to be modified over time as the surrounding ground drops.
The Palacio de Bellas Artes has a compensated foundation that failed to compensate enough; the Metropolitan Cathedral was corrected by digging shafts under the higher side and letting it sink to match the lower. Both are standard case studies in soil mechanics courses worldwide, and both are within a few hundred metres of each other.
Water Is the Underlying Problem
The subsidence and the seismic risk both trace back to the same decision. Draining Lake Texcoco removed the surface water supply, and the city has drawn its water from the aquifer beneath the clay ever since, at rates well above natural recharge.
Around 60% of Mexico City's water still comes from that aquifer, and the rest is pumped uphill from the Cutzamala system, over a kilometre of vertical lift, which makes it among the most energy-intensive municipal water supplies in the world. Leakage from the distribution network is estimated at 30 to 40%.
Every additional cubic metre extracted compresses the clay a little further, which sinks the city, which breaks the pipes, which increases leakage, which requires more extraction. Mexico City's tall buildings are engineered around a hydrological feedback loop that nobody has yet found a way to stop.
Paseo de la Reforma
Reforma is the avenue that holds most of the city's tall buildings, laid out in the 1860s under Emperor Maximilian on the model of the Champs-Élysées, connecting Chapultepec Castle to the historic centre.
Torre Mayor, completed in 2003 at 225 metres, was the tallest in Latin America for several years and introduced the damper technology now standard in the city — 96 seismic dampers arranged in a diagrid, designed to absorb energy from a magnitude 8.5 event.
Chapultepec Uno at 241 metres, Torre BBVA at 235 metres by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Legorreta, and Reforma 222 fill in the rest. The avenue's Angel of Independence monument, from 1910, sits in the middle of them and has needed steps added to its base as the ground around it has sunk.
Where Mexico City Ranks
Torre Mitikah is among the ten tallest buildings in Latin America. The tallest in the region is the Gran Torre Santiago in Chile at 300 metres, completed in 2013, followed by Brazil's Balneário Camboriú towers and Torre Reforma Colón and others in Mexico.
Mexico has more buildings above 150 metres than any other Latin American country, spread between Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara. Monterrey's Torre KOI reaches 279.5 metres, which makes it taller than anything in the capital.
Latin America as a whole has no supertall building. Nothing in the region passes 300 metres except the Gran Torre Santiago, which reaches it exactly.
Seeing the City
The Torre Latinoamericana's 44th-floor deck at 139 metres is the classic viewpoint and looks straight down onto the Zócalo and the cathedral. Mirador Torre Latino includes a small museum on the building's history.
Chapultepec Castle, on a hill in the park, gives the view down Reforma with the towers lined up along it. Mitikah's own upper floors are private.
The most striking perspective is from the air on the approach to Benito Juárez airport, which crosses the whole basin: a city of over 21 million people filling a mountain-ringed bowl, with a single line of towers along one avenue. For regional comparisons, see the tallest building in São Paulo and the count of countries in North America.