By Harry Nara · Last updated
Roma Norte for a first visit and the best walking, Condesa for the parks and the quietest nights, the Centro Histórico to wake up inside the monuments at the lowest price, Polanco for Chapultepec and the museums, and Coyoacán if you would rather have a village than a city. Every other page on this site tells you to read a number. Here you have to read a name, because the unit that locates an address in Mexico City is the colonia, and almost nothing you will book uses it properly.
A Mexican address is not written the way most visitors read it. The postal standard puts the street and number on one line, then the colonia, then the five-digit postcode, then the alcaldía, and the colonia is not optional: it is the field that actually locates you. Mexico City has sixteen alcaldías and something over eighteen hundred colonias inside them, so the borough tells you roughly which eighth of a very large city you are in and almost nothing else. Cuauhtémoc alone contains Roma, Condesa, Juárez, Zona Rosa and the Centro Histórico, which are five completely different trips.
This matters when you book because the search box does not speak colonia. Booking.com lists nine neighbourhoods for this city and they are not the same kind of thing as each other: Reforma, with more properties than any other entry, is an avenue rather than a district; Zona Rosa sits inside Juárez; Colonia Cuauhtémoc is a specific colonia that shares its name with the alcaldía containing five of the others; and Coyoacán is a whole borough of fifty-four square kilometres standing in for one small historic village inside it. Search the real name of the district everyone recommends and it fails outright. Typing Roma Norte into the search box returns a hotel at the airport, one in Coyoacán and one on the ring road, because Roma Norte is not a word the site knows. The five areas below are the ones worth having, and each one names the colonia its hotels are actually in.
Each hotel link opens Booking.com with that property at the top of the results. Because this page is not tied to a single month, no dates are pre-filled — add your own, or search a different area entirely from the same screen. Hotel links are affiliate links. We may earn a small commission if you book, at no extra cost to you.
The best areas to stay in Mexico City
The best walking in the city, and the easiest first visit
Roma Norte
Suits: First trips, three or four nights, couples, anyone who came to eat
Roma Norte is the answer for most first visits, and the reason is that it is flat, gridded, shaded and dense with places to eat, so an evening here needs no plan and no taxi. It was laid out as a planned colonia in the early twentieth century, which is why it behaves so differently from the colonial centre a kilometre and a half north: wide streets, plane trees, and two proper squares, Río de Janeiro and Luis Cabrera, that function as the neighbourhood living room.
What you are buying is the shortest distance between your room and the thing you came for. The Centro is one Metro stop or a half-hour walk, Condesa is continuous with it on the western edge, and the restaurants people fly here for are mostly inside these thirty blocks. What you are not buying is quiet or space, and you pay a premium over the Centro for both of those absences.
Watch out: Booking.com files Roma Norte and Roma Sur under one label called Roma, and the two ends are a genuine walk apart: properties under that single filter sit anywhere from 2.7 to 4.8 kilometres from the Zócalo. Check the colonia line of the address before you book, not the neighbourhood tag: all three hotels below carry postcode 06700, which is the Roma Norte end of it. Roma is also the loudest of these five areas on a Friday, and the rain between May and October arrives in the late afternoon rather than politely overnight.
- Splurge NaNa Vida CDMX A roof terrace and a twenty-four hour desk in a converted house on Orizaba, one of the two streets Roma is built around. Booking.com rates the location 9.8 out of 10 across 649 reviews, which is the highest score anywhere on this page. Its address is written out as Col. Roma Norte, which is the level of precision the rest of this page is about.
- Sweet spot Stanza Hotel A restaurant, a bar, room service and free parking, which is an unusual combination this far inside the centre, alongside family rooms and a fitness centre. It stands on Avenida Álvaro Obregón, the tree-lined avenue the neighbourhood organises itself along, and close to two thousand guests put the location at 9.4.
- Budget Hotel MX mas roma CDMX Breakfast that booking.com guests score as wonderful, plus a terrace, a fitness centre and private parking, at the lowest rate of these three. More than thirteen hundred reviews hold the location at 9.6. It sits on Mérida, inside the same few blocks as the other two rather than out at the Roma Sur end.
Parks, shade and the quietest nights of the five
Condesa, which is three colonias
Suits: Second visits, longer stays, runners, anyone travelling with a dog
Condesa is built around two parks, Parque México and Parque España, and the larger one sits inside an oval street that was a horse-racing track until the 1920s, which is why the layout here curves while Roma next door runs straight. It is the greenest central address in the city and the one that most rewards a stay of a week rather than three nights.
The trade is distance. Nothing here is on a Metro line you will use much, the walk to the Centro is a long one, and the evening ends earlier than it does in Roma. In exchange you get shade, quiet, and the only part of central Mexico City where the dominant sound after ten at night is other people walking their dogs.
Watch out: What everyone calls Condesa is three separate colonias with three separate postcodes, and the hotels below prove it: one is in Hipódromo Condesa at 06100, another in Condesa proper at 06140. They are adjacent and it makes little practical difference, but it is why two hotels a few streets apart can look like different neighbourhoods on a map. The area is also the furthest of the five from the Centro, and it thins out early on weeknights.
- Splurge Andaz Condesa Mexico City, By Hyatt An outdoor pool, a spa and an airport shuttle, which between them cover the three things this neighbourhood otherwise sends you elsewhere for, with step-free facilities and a bar. Its address is the most complete on this page and worth reading as a worked example: Aguascalientes 158, Col. Hipódromo Condesa, Cuauhtémoc, 06100. Street, colonia, alcaldía, postcode, in that order.
- Sweet spot Rodona Hotel A spa and wellness centre and a terrace in a small hotel on Avenida México, the street that loops right around Parque México, so the park is the outlook rather than a walk. The location scores 9.6. Remember the street name for the Coyoacán section below.
- Budget Condesa Suites Free parking, family rooms and a lift, which is the practical end of this neighbourhood rather than the design end, at a location guests score 9.5 across nearly twelve hundred reviews. Its printed address says Col. Condesa and its booking.com web address says cuauhtemoc. Both are correct, and they are not the same level of the map.
Inside the monuments, and the cheapest central rooms in the city
The Centro Histórico
Suits: Short trips, museums, anyone who wants to walk out into the Zócalo
This is the only one of the five where you can leave the hotel and be standing in front of the thing you came to see. The Zócalo, the cathedral, the Templo Mayor, Bellas Artes and the Palacio Nacional are inside a walk of a few hundred metres, and the hotels here are priced below the western colonias despite it, which is the opposite of how most cities work.
The postcode does some of the explaining. Almost everything central reads 06000 or 06020, both of them Colonia Centro, and the whole district is a UNESCO-listed grid laid out on top of the Aztec ceremonial precinct, which is why the streets are narrow, the buildings lean and the ground is visibly uneven. You are sleeping on a drained lake bed, and the buildings tell you so.
Watch out: The Centro empties after dark in a way Roma and Condesa do not, and the blocks change character quickly street by street, so the walk back matters more here than anywhere else on this page. It is also genuinely noisy by day, with street trade and amplified sound that starts early. Rooms facing the interior courtyard rather than the street are worth asking for.
- Splurge Hotel Bellas Artes A restaurant, room service, an airport shuttle and step-free facilities, on Avenida 5 de Mayo with the Palacio de Bellas Artes closing the view at the end of the street. The location scores 9.7 across more than nine hundred reviews.
- Sweet spot Hotel Catedral A terrace with the cathedral towers directly above it, a restaurant, free parking and breakfast its guests rate excellent. With 4,392 reviews behind a location score of 9.7 it is the most heavily reviewed property on this page by a wide margin, and it stands 250 metres from the Zócalo.
- Budget Hotel Principal A bar, a restaurant, a terrace and a fitness centre at the lowest rate of these three, in a building on Bolívar whose address reads simply Col. Centro. Three and a half thousand guests put the location at 9.6.
Chapultepec and the museums, at the highest prices in the city
Polanco
Suits: Museums, families, business, anyone who wants a large modern room
Polanco exists for two reasons. It sits along the north side of Chapultepec, which at roughly 680 hectares is one of the largest city parks in the Americas and holds the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the castle and the Museo Tamayo. And it is where the money is, so the restaurants, the shops and the hotel rooms are all a tier above the rest of the city.
For a first visit this is usually the wrong choice and for a second one it can be the right one. If the trip is built around the Anthropology Museum, or if you need a large room and a pool and a gym, nowhere else in the city does it as well. If the trip is built around eating and walking, Roma does it better for less.
Watch out: Booking.com splits this one colonia across two labels, filing some Polanco hotels under a shopping street called Masaryk instead, so a search on the neighbourhood tag alone will miss properties with Polanco in their own names. The area is also the least walkable of the five for anything other than shopping and museums, and it is the one where the gap between what you pay and what you get is widest if you are not going to Chapultepec.
- Splurge Presidente InterContinental Mexico City Six restaurants inside one building, a spa, an airport shuttle and step-free facilities, on Campos Elíseos with Chapultepec on the other side of the road. Two thousand reviews hold the location at 9.6.
- Sweet spot Hyatt Regency Mexico City An indoor pool, which matters more than it sounds in a city where it rains every afternoon for six months of the year, together with a spa, a bar and breakfast guests call excellent. It stands on the same street as the InterContinental and scores 9.7. Its address spells out Colonia Polanco in full.
- Budget Kukun Homero Polanco A terrace, a fitness centre and family rooms at a rate well under the two above, on Avenida Homero, one of the Polanco streets named after writers. The location scores 9.4 across 446 reviews.
A colonial village ten kilometres south, and the best value of the five
Coyoacán, the village not the borough
Suits: Longer stays, Frida Kahlo, anyone who would rather not sleep in a city
The village was a separate town until the city grew south and swallowed it, and it still reads as one: two linked plazas, a sixteenth-century church, a market, and the cobbled streets around the Casa Azul where Frida Kahlo was born and died. Rooms cost noticeably less than the four areas above and the standard is high, which is the compensation for being a long way out.
The transport warning is not a technicality. Metro Coyoacán sits on Avenida Universidad in the Benito Juárez borough, not this one, and it is named after Coyoacán Avenue, which runs one block away and leads here. The station was going to be called Centro Bancomer until commercial names were ruled out. From it the historic centre is around half an hour on foot. Viveros is the more useful stop, and a taxi from the plaza to Roma takes half an hour without traffic and considerably longer with it.
Watch out: This is where the borough-for-a-neighbourhood problem does real damage. Coyoacán the alcaldía covers fifty-four square kilometres; Coyoacán the village is a few blocks around two adjoining squares. Filter on the neighbourhood tag and the results run from 9.2 to 15.2 kilometres out, which is the difference between the plaza and a shopping centre on the ring road. Worse, the Metro station called Coyoacán is not in Coyoacán at all.
- Splurge Ágata Hotel Boutique & Spa A spa, a restaurant, a bar and a terrace in a small boutique house, with the location scored 9.7. Its address is Avenida México 21, which is a different Avenida México from the one in Condesa above and roughly ten kilometres from it. The street name alone will not locate you here, and that is the whole point of the colonia.
- Sweet spot Casa Tuna Breakfast that booking.com guests rate exceptional, which is the grade above excellent and rare anywhere, with a terrace and family rooms. The location scores 9.7 across 519 reviews, on Francisco Ortega inside postcode 04100, the one that covers the old village.
- Budget La Casita de Coyoacán Free parking and a terrace at the cheapest rate on this page, and the caveat is written into its own address: Barrio San Lucas, 04030. That is a different pocket from the plaza and a walk rather than a step, and the address also still says Delegación Coyoacán, which is the name the boroughs stopped using in 2016.
When to book, and what it costs you
Mexico City prices on events and on the dry season rather than on heat, because the temperature barely moves across the year. The expensive weeks are the ones around Dia de Muertos at the start of November, the Guadalupe feast and Christmas in December, and the jacaranda weeks in March. The cheapest rooms are in the wet season from June to September, when it is green, clear every morning and wet most afternoons, and when the city is at its emptiest. Book November a season ahead; for June a few weeks will do.
The best value is usually June and July.
Prices and availability tighten most in November, December and March.
The tax on a Mexico City room is smaller than most cities on this site and it is worth knowing exactly what it is, because the figures published about it disagree with each other. The Código Fiscal de la Ciudad de México sets the Impuesto por la Prestación de Servicios de Hospedaje at three per cent, in article 164, and that single rate is the only one those articles contain. Widely repeated figures of three and a half and five per cent, and a claim that apartments booked through a platform are taxed higher than hotel rooms, do not appear in the text: article 162 brings hotels, hostels, motels, campsites and whole or part apartments and houses under the same tax, and article 162 bis obliges a platform to register and file, not to charge more. Article 162 also says plainly that the tax is passed on to the guest, so it lands on your bill rather than on the property. One clause is worth knowing if you are comparing a bundled rate against a room-only one: article 163 provides that where a property includes extras such as transport, meals or use of its facilities in the price and does not itemise them, the entire amount is treated as lodging and taxed accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a colonia, and why does it matter when booking in Mexico City?
A colonia is the neighbourhood unit that a Mexican address is actually built on. The postal standard runs street and number, then colonia, then postcode, then alcaldía, and the colonia is a required field rather than a nicety. Mexico City has sixteen alcaldías and over eighteen hundred colonias, so a listing that tells you only the borough has told you very little: Cuauhtémoc alone holds Roma, Condesa, Juárez, Zona Rosa and the Centro Histórico. When you compare two hotels, compare the colonia lines of their addresses, not the neighbourhood tags the booking site has attached to them.
Which area should I stay in on a first visit to Mexico City?
Roma Norte, for most people. It is flat, gridded, shaded and dense with restaurants, the Centro is a single Metro stop or a half-hour walk away, and an evening there needs no planning. The Centro Histórico is the alternative if the monuments are the trip and you want to pay less, and Condesa is the better answer if you are staying a week rather than three nights.
Is the Centro Histórico safe to stay in?
It is the busiest part of the city by day and the emptiest of these five areas after dark, and the character changes street by street rather than block by block, so the route back to the hotel is worth thinking about in a way it is not in Roma or Condesa. Nothing about staying there is unusual, and the hotels on this page sit within a few hundred metres of the Zócalo. Take the normal precautions of a large city centre, use authorised taxis or an app rather than the street at night, and ask for a courtyard-facing room, because the daytime noise is real.
Why does the Coyoacán filter show hotels ten kilometres apart?
Because Coyoacán is a borough of about fifty-four square kilometres and the place people mean by the name is a small colonial village inside it. Booking.com uses the borough as the neighbourhood label, so one filter covers both the plaza and properties out by the ring road, and the results on the dates checked for this page ran from 9.2 to 15.2 kilometres from the centre. Read the postcode: 04100 is the old village, and anything else is a different part of a very large borough.
How much tax is added to a hotel room in Mexico City?
Three per cent. The Código Fiscal de la Ciudad de México sets the lodging tax at that rate in article 164, and it is passed on to the guest rather than absorbed by the property. Higher figures circulate widely, including a claim that apartments booked through a platform pay five per cent against three and a half for hotels, but the articles governing this tax set one rate and apply it to hotels, hostels, motels and whole or part apartments alike. Mexican rates are quoted separately from the federal IVA, so check whether a headline price includes it.
Checked against Código Fiscal de la Ciudad de México, arts. 162 to 164 (lodging tax), Secretaría de Administración y Finanzas CDMX, impuesto por servicios de hospedaje, Servicio Postal Mexicano, manual de domicilios postales y códigos postales, Demarcaciones territoriales de la Ciudad de México (the sixteen alcaldías), Coyoacán metro station, on its borough and its name. Hotel details are verified on each property’s own Booking.com listing.
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