As the crown jewel of the Spanish empire in the New World, Mexico City is filled with monuments to its colonial years. A traveler would be hard pressed to find anywhere in the Americas with more colonial monuments per square meter than the Centro Histórico. Whether you are interested in the architecture or the history, Mexico City has a wealth of interesting colonial sights to explore.

CENTRO HISTÓRICO
Both the Catedral and the Palacio Nacional are classics of religious and civic architecture, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For a well-hidden display of the flights that religious art took in the baroque era, take a peek into the 18th-century Iglesia de la Enseñanza, with nine dazzling gold-leafed retablos (altar pieces) crammed inside the small church. Keep your eyes peeled for the lovely architecture of the old mansions that earned Mexico City its colonial-era sobriquet of la ciudad de los palacios (the city of palaces)—like the Palacio de Iturbide, on Moneda, or Casa de los Condes Heras y Soto, at the corner of Chile and Donceles. Three blocks south of the Zócalo you can see the final resting place of the man who started it all, Hernán Cortés—the enigmatic and much-maligned Spaniard who conquered Mexico—marked by a simple plaque near the altar of the Iglesia de Jesús Nazareno, reputedly the spot where he first met Aztec Emperor Moctezuma on that fateful day in 1519.

REFORMA / CHAPULTEPEC
For those interested in the history of the Spanish conquest, it’s possible to trace the route of the Spanish soldiers as they fled the city in panic during the noche triste (sad night) in 1520 after an attack by the Aztecs. Follow Calle Tacuba west from the Zócalo, and once past the Alameda you’ll be atop what was once the Aztec causeway across the lake, over which the Spaniards ran for their lives. A few kilometers west still stands (if you can believe it) the burned-out trunk of the Árbol de la Noche Triste, the very same tree that Cortés leaned against and wept when the remaining soldiers reached the mainland to regroup and relaunch their conquest. For a taste of what wealthy Spaniards must have lived like at the height of their empire, take a tour (Sundays only) of the Casa de la Bola, an opulent mansion just south of Chapultepec and restored with period furniture and decorations.

SOUTHERN MEXICO CITY
A trip to the neighborhood of Coyoacán offers a taste of what a colonial suburb might have felt like, with narrow cobblestone streets winding around twin plazas, and with centuries-old churches and houses on all sides. This is where Cortés had his palace and where he installed La Malinche, the woman who served as his interpreter and lover, and who is an emblematic and enigmatic figure in Mexican history. Similar to Coyoacán, but considerably smaller and less visited, is Tlalpan, situated around a very fine little plaza hidden off backstreets near the highway exit to Cuernavaca. Up in the mountains south of the city, in the park of Desierto de los Leones, is a lovely colonial monastery built as a retreat in the forests by Carmelite monks in the late 18th century.

AROUND MEXICO CITY
Puebla, just over the mountains to the east of Mexico City, was a key Spanish city during the colonial era and is filled with myriad monuments from that time. The Catedral is one of the finest in Mexico, and there’s plenty of churches and museums to see, as well as more unusual sites like the Harry Potter–style Biblioteca Palafoxiana (a library). Nearby is Cholula, with even more colonial churches, and Huejotzingo, an early 16th-century monastery with fantastical stone carvings. If you’ve got a car and feel like an adventure, follow the dirt road beyond Cholula through the village of San Nicolás de los Ranchos up to the Paso de Cortés, the high pass between the great volcanoes of Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl, the vantage point from where Cortés first saw the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán below.