We didn't make it to the San Ángel neighborhood when we visited Mexico City for the first time in…read more2023, but we visited a couple of weeks ago when we returned to Mexico City. It's a lovely neighborhood - well worth a visit for people visiting the city. One of the reason it's so great? Plaza San Jacinto. The plaza is traditional, with a fountain in the center and paths leading to it from each corner and side of the plaza. With plenty of trees, benches, and people, it's a great place for a walk/stroll or to sit on a bench and listen to music or read or people watch. But the highlight of a visit to Plaza San Jacinto? Every Saturday, it hosts the Bazaar Sábado - a traditional market of hundreds of artists, artisans, and sellers of almost everything you can imagine. We were lucky to be walking through the Plaza around 6pm on a Saturday (the market is from 10am-7pm every Saturday), and it was such a treat. But on every side of the Plaza are gorgeous buildings that house shops, restaurants, and a museum (Museo Casa del Risco), making the Plaza and its surroundings a great place to spend a few hours!

Plaza San Jacinto is just a twenty-minute walk from the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida…read moreKahlo and visiting both makes for a great Saturday. The Saturday artist market in the plaza always includes a wealth of talented painters lining the pathways although kitsch and craft has crept in since tourists discovered the market. I still deeply regret not buying a fantastic almost-abstract landscape painting years ago and that stayed in my mind as I strolled through the plaza and the thin stone streets of San Ángel.

This is probably one of the best kept secrets about Mexico City, where you would never know you…read morewere if you visited here. When I think of Mexico City, I think of an overcrowded and overpolluted city of 22 million people where is can take more than an hour to drive one mile. This particular place provides a great escape from the madness. If you go all the way to the top, there's an ex-convent ($17 MXN admission) and great biking and running trails that go for miles. There's a charge of $20 MXN (about $1 USD) if keep going up beyond the roughly 3/4 mark, or you can park before that and just walk around. I do not recommend this park for road biking off the trails. The curves are very blind and dangerous, people still drive like maniacs even though they're in a park and therefore, you're just an accident waiting to happen. Stick to the trails and you'll be all right. The extent of the wildlife we observed were two oversided black squirrels, which may not have been squirrels after all.