Day trips from Mexico City

Teotihuacán

The city runs along the Avenue of the Dead, an axis over two kilometres long with the Pyramid of the Moon closing the north end, the Pyramid of the Sun, among the largest in the world by volume, to one side, and the Ciudadela complex with the Temple of the Feathered Serpent to the south. It was inhabited from before the common era until its decline around the seventh or eighth century.

What’s fascinating is how little we know: it isn’t known for certain which people built it, what language they spoke, or why it collapsed. No rulers’ tombs or clear depictions of kings have appeared, which suggests a political organisation different from those that came after.

The fact to carry up to date: climbing the Pyramid of the Sun has been prohibited since 2020. Access to the Moon pyramid was allowed again, only as far as the first level, from May 2025, but was suspended once more in April 2026. This point has changed three times in five years, so check the INAH website before going rather than trusting a printed guide. What doesn’t change is that you cross it on foot, with no shade, at 2,300 metres: hat, water and sun protection.

Puebla

Puebla sits about two hours away by bus and its historic centre made the UNESCO list: façades covered in talavera tile, an enormous cathedral, and the Capilla del Rosario, an explosion of gilded New Spanish Baroque plasterwork you have to see in person to believe. It’s also where mole poblano and chiles en nogada were born, so the trip has a clear culinary side. Nearby is Cholula, with what is probably the largest pyramid in the world by volume, covered in earth with a church on top.

Tepoztlán and Cuernavaca

Rock walls wedge Tepoztlán in, and on top of one of them sits the Tepozteco: a small pyramid reached by a steep forty-five-minute path that leaves you breathless. The altitude helps. The village has a weekend market, a sixteenth-century former monastery that is UNESCO-listed, and a reputation as a place of energies, with the esoteric shops that implies.

Cuernavaca, next door, has for centuries been where people from the capital go to escape the cold: they call it the city of eternal spring and it sits some seven hundred metres lower, with gardens and weekend houses.

Hernán Cortés had a palace built there, today a museum with a Rivera mural.

The monarch butterflies, in season

Between November and March, the monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacán and the State of Mexico receive the millions that have flown from Canada and the United States, a journey of over four thousand kilometres that no single butterfly completes: successive generations finish it. They cluster on the trunks of the fir trees in such quantities that the branches bend. It’s a biosphere reserve and UNESCO-listed. It’s about three hours from the city, you go up on foot or on horseback, and it only makes sense in those months.