Montañas que rodean a la CDMX

A city inside a ring of mountains. Mexico City sits in a closed basin, held by sierras and volcanoes that belong to the geological province of the lakes and volcanoes of Anáhuac. Alfonso Reyes called it a "spacious circus of mountains". Most residents see them every day and could not name one of them.

North: the Sierra de Guadalupe. Horseshoe-shaped, with one arm ending at the Cerro del Tepeyac, opposite the Villa de Guadalupe. Its high point is the Cerro El Guerrero, and it also holds the Cerro del Chiquihuite, whose antennas carry the television signal across the valley.

East: the Sierra de Santa Catarina. A chain of dormant volcanoes, the highest of them El Borrego at nearly 2,800 metres. Together with the Cerro de la Estrella this range once formed the Iztapalapa peninsula, which separated the salt water of Texcoco from the fresh water coming down from Chalco and Xochimilco — the geography Reyes describes in Visión de Anáhuac.

West: Chapultepec and the Sierra de las Cruces. The Cerro de Chapultepec rises near the centre; further out, between Cuajimalpa and Magdalena Contreras, the Sierra de las Cruces holds the Desierto de los Leones and forms the boundary with the State of Mexico.

South: the Ajusco. The highest point in the city at close to 4,000 metres, crowning the sierra of the same name and closing the ring.

The five volcanoes. Ajusco, in Tlalpan, with the Cumbres del Ajusco national park. Teuhtli, shared between Tláhuac, Milpa Alta and Xochimilco, climbed from Santiago Tulyehualco, with a crater at the top. Tláloc, 3,600 metres, the second-highest peak in the city, in Milpa Alta. Chichinauhtzin, straddling the city and Morelos. And El Borrego, also called Volcán de Guadalupe, in Iztapalapa.

Practical notes. All five sit inside ecological reserves or national parks and are open for walking. Go in the dry season and early in the day; above 3,000 metres the weather turns fast and the afternoons bring cloud. From June to September it rains almost every afternoon.