59 Fun Facts About Mexico City

What nickname do Mexicans use for people from Mexico City?

Chilangos. Elsewhere in Mexico the word often carries a sneer, and though some residents dislike being called it, many now use it of themselves with humour or ease.

In Aztec legend, an eagle perched on which plant marked the spot to build Tenochtitlan?

A cactus. The eagle on its prickly pear sits at the centre of Mexico's flag today, and the Mexica who found the sign on a marshy lake island built their capital outwards from it.

Which active volcano near Mexico City has a Nahuatl name meaning 'Smoking Mountain'?

Popocatépetl. 'El Popo' stands about 70 km southeast of the capital and woke in 1994 after decades of quiet; its ash has since grounded flights at Mexico City's airport more than once.

The Aztecs drove Cortés's army out of Tenochtitlan in 1520 in a rout known by what name?

La Noche Triste, the 'sad night'. Many of Cortés's men drowned beside the causeway out of the city, dragged under by the gold they had loaded themselves with.

Which last Aztec emperor, a successor of Moctezuma II, surrendered Tenochtitlan to Cortés in 1521?

Cuauhtémoc. He held the city through a siege of about three months, and Cortés, fearing a revolt, later took him on a march to Honduras and had him hanged on the way.

Which disease, new to the Americas, swept through Tenochtitlan in 1520 before Cortés's final siege?

Smallpox. It reached Mexico with the Spanish and killed much of the Aztec leadership, while the invaders, raised in a country where the disease was common, were largely spared.

Mexico City sits about 2,240 metres up; which of these capitals stands even higher?

Bogotá. Colombia's capital stands at about 2,640 metres, some 400 metres above Mexico City, while Santiago, for all its Andean backdrop, lies little more than 500 metres up.

Which Mexico City borough honours the president who outlasted Maximilian?

Benito Juárez. He kept his republican government alive by retreating north to the US border, returned once the French army left, and has the city's main airport named after him too.

On the UN's 2018 list, which urban area in the Americas outranked Greater Mexico City?

Sao Paulo. The UN put it at about 21.7 million people against Greater Mexico City's 21.6 million, a gap of barely 70,000, with both far ahead of New York's 18.8 million.

Why is Mexico City sinking?

Groundwater is over-pumped from the old lake bed, so the clay underneath compresses and cracks. The Spanish drained the lakes the city once lived on, which left wells as its main water supply.

Until a 2016 reform renamed it Ciudad de México, the capital was officially called what?

The Federal District. Residents had called their home 'el DF' for decades, and the change set the capital on the road to its own constitution and powers close to those of a state.

Mexico City's main square, formally the Plaza de la Constitución, is better known as what?

The Zócalo. The word means 'plinth': in 1843 a grand commemorative column was planned for the middle of the square, only its base was ever laid, and the nickname stuck.

Which Mexico City landmark took almost 250 years to build, from 1573 to 1813?

The Metropolitan Cathedral. So many generations of architects worked on it, from Claudio de Arciniega to Manuel Tolsá, that it mixes Gothic, Baroque and Neoclassical styles in one building.

Electricity workers digging in Mexico City in 1978 struck a carved stone disc that revealed which buried Aztec temple?

The Templo Mayor. The disc, more than three metres wide, shows the dismembered goddess Coyolxauhqui, and the find set off a full excavation of the temple, which now has its own museum.

The name Chapultepec means what in Nahuatl?

Grasshopper hill. Aztec rulers kept a retreat on the hill and sent its spring water into Tenochtitlan along an aqueduct.

Chapultepec Castle was the residence of Maximilian I during which period?

The Second Mexican Empire, 1864-67. Maximilian had the old military academy rebuilt as his palace; after his fall Mexico's presidents moved in, and it is now the National Museum of History.

The cadets who died defending Chapultepec Castle against US troops in 1847 are remembered as what?

Los Ninos Heroes. Legend has it that the last of them, Juan Escutia, wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and leapt from the castle walls so that it could not be captured.

Paseo de la Reforma, laid out for Emperor Maximilian, is often likened to which Paris avenue?

The Champs-Elysees. The drive was first known as the Promenade of the Empress, Maximilian's wife Carlota; after he was shot the republicans dropped the name, and in 1872 it took that of their liberal Reform.

Mexico City's sinking ground has forced the city to add 14 steps to the base of which monument?

Angel of Independence. The soft ground troubled it from the start: in 1906 the half-built column had to be pulled down and begun again on new foundations after the first ones failed.

The Palacio de Bellas Artes has a stage curtain made of nearly a million pieces of glass by which firm?

Tiffany's of New York. Its glass forms a view of the Valley of Mexico with two volcanoes at the centre, made for a theatre that was begun in 1904 but, stalled by revolution, opened only in 1934.

Which Mexico City skyscraper, opened in 1956, came through the great earthquakes of 1957 and 1985 undamaged?

Torre Latinoamericana. Its engineers drove hundreds of piles some 33 metres into the city's soft clay and set the steel frame on a foundation designed to float in the mud.

Mexico City's deadly earthquakes of 1985 and 2017 had what in common?

The same calendar date, 19 September. The 2017 quake struck about two hours after the yearly drill held to mark 1985, and a third big one hit Mexico on that very date in 2022.

To guide non-readers, each Mexico City Metro station has its own what?

Pictogram. Lance Wyman, fresh from designing the 1968 Olympics graphics, based the first ones on each stop's name or surroundings, so that riders can know Candelaria station simply as 'the duck'.

Which Oscar-winning 2018 film is named after the Mexico City neighbourhood where its director grew up?

Roma. Alfonso Cuarón drew the drama from his own 1970s childhood in the district, told it through the family's live-in housekeeper, and won the Oscar for Best Director with it.

Visitors to Xochimilco ride the canals in colourful boats called what?

Trajineras. The flat-bottomed boats were once everyday transport across the lake; now each carries a name, often a woman's, on its painted arch, and boatloads of musicians float alongside playing for the passengers.

What is a chinampa?

An artificial island for farming. Farmers built each plot up on the shallow lake from reeds, mud and plants, and the 'floating gardens' of the nickname are today firmly rooted islands.

Which critically endangered salamander, famous for regrowing limbs, is native to the lakes of Xochimilco?

The axolotl. Urban sprawl, polluted water and introduced carp and tilapia have pushed it close to extinction in the wild, even as laboratories and pet shops around the world keep it in large numbers.

The Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City is nicknamed La Casa Azul because of what?

Its cobalt-blue walls. Kahlo was born in the house and died there, and her husband then gave it away to become her museum, which opened a year after his own death.

Which exiled Russian revolutionary was murdered in his Mexico City house in 1940?

Leon Trotsky. He had survived a machine-gun raid on the house three months earlier; then a Soviet agent who had charmed his way into the household struck him with an ice axe.

Cortés governed New Spain from which lakeside town, now a Mexico City borough, while the capital was rebuilt?

Coyoacán. Cortés made his home and set up a town council here in 1521, running the colony from the lakeshore until the new Mexico City had risen on Tenochtitlan's rubble.

By tradition, the image at Mexico City's Basilica of Guadalupe appeared on whose cloak?

Juan Diego. So many pilgrims come that moving walkways carry them beneath the cloak, and John Paul II declared him a saint in the basilica in 2002.

Arena México, a Mexico City landmark since 1956, is nicknamed the 'cathedral' of what?

Lucha libre. Its wrestlers guard their masks as their honour: a luchador who stakes his mask on a bout and loses must take it off in the ring, the worst humiliation the sport has to offer.

Which famous artefact is housed in the National Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec?

The Aztec Sun Stone. The huge basalt disc was buried after the Spanish conquest and lay beneath the city until it was unearthed in 1790; Moctezuma's headdress, by contrast, is in Vienna.

Which club played the first match at Mexico City's Estadio Azteca, against Italy's Torino in 1966?

Club América. The game ended 2–2, and fifty years on the Azteca's home club brought out a dark red away shirt in honour of those first visitors.

The Estadio Azteca was the first stadium to host what twice?

The FIFA World Cup final. Pelé's Brazil won there in 1970, and in 1986 Maradona punched in his 'Hand of God' goal on the same pitch a week before lifting the trophy on it with Argentina.

Which league played its first regular-season game outside the US at Mexico City's Estadio Azteca in 2005?

NFL. The Arizona Cardinals beat the San Francisco 49ers 31–14 in front of more than 103,000 fans, and two years later the league launched its International Series of regular-season games in London.

The 1968 Mexico City Olympics were the first held where?

In Latin America. Mexico City beat Detroit, Lyon and Buenos Aires for the Games, and its thin air then helped sprinters and jumpers to world records while most distance runners struggled.

Which two US sprinters raised black-gloved fists on the podium at the 1968 Games?

Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The 200 m gold and bronze medallists stood shoeless to stand for Black poverty, and were then suspended from the US team and ordered to leave Mexico.

In which Mexico City district did the army fire on student protesters ten days before the 1968 Olympics opened?

Tlatelolco. The government blamed snipers among the protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas; papers released decades later point to gunmen of its own, and the death toll, put anywhere from dozens to hundreds, is still disputed.

Which American long jumper beat the world record by 55 cm at Mexico City's 1968 Olympics?

Bob Beamon. He had no idea how far he had gone until teammate Ralph Boston put the distance in feet, at which point his legs gave way; the 8.90 m mark stood for almost 23 years.

The Alameda Central in Mexico City is recognised as what?

The oldest public park in the Americas. A viceroy ordered it laid out in 1592 on the site of an Aztec market, and it is named for the poplars, álamos, first planted there.

Which ancient city of pyramids northeast of Mexico City was already in ruins when the Aztecs gave it its name?

Teotihuacan. Nobody knows what its builders called it: the Aztecs, arriving centuries after its fall, named the ruins, claimed its people as ancestors and came there on pilgrimage.

Which university in Mexico City is the country's largest, with more than 300,000 students?

UNAM. When its rector proposed raising tuition fees in 1999, students went on strike and shut the campus for almost a year; all three of Mexico's Nobel laureates studied there.

In the 1990s Mexico City was infamous for what, before becoming a model for fixing it?

Air pollution. In 1992 the UN called it the most polluted city in the world; the government then took the lead out of petrol, fitted cars with catalytic converters and moved power plants from fuel oil to natural gas.

For decades, Mexico City's streets were full of taxis of which small car, known locally as the 'vocho'?

VW Beetle. When the city ruled, to protect passengers from crime, that its taxis must have four doors, it helped persuade Volkswagen to stop building the original Beetle in 2003.

Mexico City held its first Day of the Dead parade in 2016, a year after which James Bond film invented one?

Spectre. The filmmakers dreamed up the procession of skeletons for Bond's opening chase through the old city centre, and the authorities, seeing the interest it stirred, put on a real one the next autumn.

Each 15 September, Mexico's president rings a bell from the National Palace balcony to re-enact which event?

The Cry of Dolores. By tradition the bell is the very one the priest Miguel Hidalgo rang in the town of Dolores in 1810 to call his parish to revolt, and the president ends by shouting 'Viva México!'

Which Mexico City landmark was built from the unfinished dome of a parliament building begun under Porfirio Díaz?

Monument to the Revolution. The uprising against Díaz stopped work on his legislative palace, and in the 1930s its abandoned dome was turned into a memorial to the rebels; Pancho Villa is among those buried in it.

Why was the Palacio de Bellas Artes planned in the first place?

To host the 1910 centennial of independence. The marble theatre missed its own party by 24 years: its Italian architect left during the revolution with the domes unfinished, and it opened in 1934.

Whose murals of Mexico's history, painted from 1929 to 1935, fill the main stairwell of Mexico City's National Palace?

Diego Rivera. He ran the story from the Aztecs to an imagined future, where Karl Marx points the way and his wife, Frida Kahlo, appears as a schoolteacher.

In 1854 which president decreed a vast enlargement of the district governed from Mexico City?

Antonio López de Santa Anna. It was his last spell in power: his sale of a strip of the north to the United States, the Gadsden Purchase, was finalised that same year, and in 1855 a revolt drove him into exile.

The Museo Soumaya holds one of the largest collections outside France of which sculptor's work?

Rodin. The billionaire Carlos Slim named the museum after his late wife, Soumaya, and had his son-in-law design its anvil-shaped building, clad in thousands of aluminium hexagons.

Which Beat author wrote his 1959 poetry collection Mexico City Blues while living in the city?

Jack Kerouac. He wrote its 242 'choruses' in the summer of 1955 and asked to be read as a jazz poet blowing a long blues at a Sunday afternoon jam session.

Mexico City's Plaza Garibaldi is the traditional place to hire which kind of musicians?

Mariachi bands. The charro suits they wear on the square are a later touch: the first mariachis dressed as peasants, usually in white.

Which Arnold Schwarzenegger science-fiction film was shot almost entirely in Mexico City?

Total Recall. The city's Metro plays the subway of the future, with Chabacano station on screen, while Mars was built on the sound stages of the Churubusco studios.

The 'Hoy No Circula' programme restricts what in Mexico City?

Private car use on set days is barred by the last digit of the licence plate. After the 1989 scheme became permanent, many households simply bought a second, often older, car so they could drive every day.

Which Mexico City transit system opened its first line in dedicated lanes along Avenida Insurgentes?

Metrobús. Its articulated buses replaced the microbuses that used to serve Insurgentes, and the network has since grown to seven lines, with double-deckers running along Paseo de la Reforma.

On Sunday mornings Mexico City closes Paseo de la Reforma to cars for which weekly event?

A mass bike ride. Muévete en Bici brings tens of thousands of cyclists, skaters and walkers onto miles of closed roads, and the mayor who started it went on to launch Ecobici, the city's bike-share scheme.

Which vast wholesale market in Iztapalapa handles some 30,000 tonnes of Mexico City's food every day?

Central de Abasto. It opened in 1982 to take the wholesale trade away from La Merced, the old market that had outgrown the congested historic centre.