The oldest street still in use in the Americas. Calle Tacuba runs west from the Zócalo, and it has been a thoroughfare continuously since before the conquest. It was the Tlacopan causeway, one of the three raised roads that connected the island city of Tenochtitlan to the mainland across the lake.
What happened on it. On the night of 30 June 1520, the Noche Triste, Cortés and his men fled Tenochtitlan along this causeway under attack and lost most of their force and their plunder in the water. The street you walk today follows that line.
What is on it now. MUNAL, the national art museum, in a 1911 palace with a marble staircase worth the entry on its own. The Palacio de Minería, Manuel Tolsá's neoclassical masterpiece and the finest building of its period in Mexico. El Caballito, the equestrian statue of Charles IV, also by Tolsá, in the plaza between them. The Café de Tacuba, open since 1912 in a seventeenth-century building. And the former convent of the Betlemitas, now a museum.
How to walk it. From the Zócalo westwards, it takes about fifteen minutes end to end without stopping, and most of a morning with. Metro Allende and Bellas Artes, line 2, are at either end.
All day
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