Mexico City's great urban parks and forests

Map of 17 locations in Mexico City, Mexico

Mexico City's green space runs from a 1592 colonial promenade hemmed in by museums to federally protected pine forest on the Sierra de las Cruces, and the useful distinction between them is rarely size. What matters is what each one was built for: a tree nursery that still grows seedlings for reforestation, a refinery site replanted with the flora of every Mexican state, a Japanese friendship garden, a lake shaped to recall Texcoco. Each entry here carries the hectares, the opening rules and the running surface where a source states them, so you can tell a 2.2-kilometre clay circuit from a protected watershed before you set out.

Places in this collection

  • Parque Nacional El Tepeyac — Protected as a national park since 18 February 1937, on the hills behind the Basilica in the north of the city. Dense vegetation, recreatio…
  • Bosque de Aragón — On the northeastern periphery of the city, with lakes, picnic areas, hiking paths and a wide range of tree species. A recent remodelling ad…
  • Bosque de Nativitas — More than 12 hectares of pine, ash and oak alongside one of the Xochimilco lake canals, in the south of the city. Walking trails, birdwatch…
  • Parque Nacional Desierto de los Leones — Protected since 27 November 1917 and spread over some 4,500 acres of the Sierra de las Cruces, southwest of the city and well above it. The…
  • Parque Hundido — Officially Parque Luis Gonzaga Urbina, after the poet, and called hundido for the dip in the ground it occupies. Nine hectares holding the…
  • Parque Ecológico de Xochimilco — The UNESCO-listed Xochimilco canals belong to this reserve, which covers more than 400 acres of wetland, marsh and forest with trails throu…
  • Parque España — Inaugurated in 1921 during the centennial celebrations, on the plot that once gave access to the old Condesa racetrack, to a design by the…
  • Alameda Central — Created in 1592 in the image of Seville's Alameda de Hércules and widely cited as the oldest public park in the Americas. Around eight hect…
  • Bosque de Tláhuac — An urban park on the southeastern edge of the city, in a borough whose economy still rests on agriculture and nopal in particular. It sits…
  • Parque Nacional Fuentes Brotantes — Declared a national park in 1936 to protect the springs that rise on the flanks of the Sierra del Ajusco and feed the lake at its centre. I…
  • Parque Masayoshi Ohira — Built in 1942 as a symbol of diplomatic friendship between Mexico and Japan, and described as the largest Japanese garden in the country. L…
  • Parque Tezozomoc — Inaugurated in 1982 in Azcapotzalco; sources give its area as 17 hectares and as 28. The central artificial lake was dug to reproduce the o…
  • Parque Bicentenario — The 18 de Marzo refinery worked this ground from the 1930s until 1991, when soil and air contamination closed it; the park opened in 2007 a…
  • Parque La Mexicana — Roughly 30 hectares on the western edge of the city in Santa Fe, opened 24 November 2017 and built around an artificial lake. The infrastru…
  • Viveros de Coyoacán — A working tree nursery of 39 hectares: the stock grown here goes out for reforestation, and some plants and flowers are sold to visitors. R…
  • Parque México — Officially Parque General San Martín, laid out in 1927 in Art Deco to match the Hipódromo Condesa subdivision going up around it. Nine hect…
  • Bosque de Chapultepec — 686 hectares split into numbered sections, which the World Monuments Fund counts as the largest and oldest urban park in Latin America. The…

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