Mexico City

I will say this plainly: Mexico City is the most underrated great city in the world, and the people who have been it has been obvious to for the last decade are starting to sound smug about it. It has the museums of Paris, the street life of Bangkok, the architecture of Barcelona and the weather of coastal California, and it costs a fraction of any of them. Twenty-two million people living at two thousand two hundred and forty metres on a drained lake bed, in a city that has been continuously inhabited since 1325.

What surprises people most is how gentle it is. Roma and Condesa are leafy, low-rise, full of jacaranda and bookshops and dogs, and you walk everywhere. Chapultepec is twice the size of Central Park. The light at seven thousand feet is extraordinary and photographs beautifully. And the food runs the entire range in a way almost nowhere else does – eleven MICHELIN-starred kitchens in the 2026 guide, and twenty-seven Bib Gourmands that include three taquerias and a tortilleria.

Four nights is the minimum that works. Five or six is better, because there is a day out to Teotihuacan and a day in Coyoacan that both deserve to be unhurried.