One of the best times of the year to visit Mexico City is Holy Week, or Semana Santa. This is one of the few weeks of the year when the teeming home of 20 million empties out —partly anyway— and the traffic is lighter, the streets less crowded, and the lines to get in to things somewhat shorter than usual.
Since most people have the week off work, it’s a time when the chilangos head for the provinces, filling the airports, bus stations and roads out of town, and then filling the highways and the beaches and the colonial towns.
This is when you want to be in Mexico City. It’s a good chance to take in some museum you’d been meaning to visit, go sightseeing, ride the Turibus, or wander around one of the many fine museums, or the zoo.
One of the newest museums, the Soumaya, named for business mogul Carlos Slim’s late wife, has two venues, the main one in Polanco and the other located at the southern end of the city at Plaza Loreto. Admission is free.
For those who might find a whole museum a bit tiring, and would rather call-in for a quick look round while, say, sightseeing or shopping, the place to head is the city center, the Centro Histórico, which has the greatest concentration of museums.
One always worth a visit is the National Art Museum – Munal – located on Tacuba street opposite the Palacio de Minería. This can easily form part of a day’s sightseeing in the downtown area.
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