The best known area of the colonia is Zona Rosa (Pink Zone) which is a tourist attraction for its artistic and intellectual reputation and is home to Mexico City's gay community.

[3][4] Around the 1880s the city expanded west past Colonia Santa Maria de la Ribera, enveloping the areas where now are found the streets named Donato Guerra, Antonio Caso, Balderas, Chapultepec and Bucareli.

[2] Many of the new streets were named after European capitals, due to early resident and ex-consulate of Mexico Ricardo García Granado, for his children had been born in some of these cities as he performed his diplomatic duties.

[3] At the end of the 19th century, this area became a favorite getaway for the wealthy elite of Mexico City, who began to build country houses here, to be close to the Chapultepec forest.

[5] The first residents of the new colonia were those who made their fortunes in land speculation, haciendas in other parts of Mexico, mines, banks, oil and railroads.

[3] During the regime of Porfirio Díaz the area was filled with restaurants, cafes, bakeries and plazas, where people gathered to socialize during evenings and weekends.

It was home to a bar called "Ciro's" during the 1940s and 1950s, where Pedro Infante began his career; María Félix visited and Agustín Lara gave concerts.

After the war was over, a number of these mansions were appropriated by the government to house institutions such as the Secretary of Health, now Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social .

[5] However, it still remained upscale with the wedding of Alex Berger to María Félix occurring at an Art Nouveau mansion at Londres #6 in 1956 (today the Wax Museum).

The colonia hosted other names such as Guadalupe Amor, Manuel Felguérez, Lilia Carrillo, Alfonso Suarez del Real and Elena Poniatowski.

Street peddlers significantly increased in number, and many of the damaged structures became inhabited by squatters or were converted into tenements, with absentee landlords that did not bother to collect the long-frozen rents.

[13] Major sidewalk, pedestrian street and garden area reconstruction was undertaken in Zona Rosa in the mid-to-late first decade of the 21st century, after 20 years of no maintenance.

[7] New construction, most of it tall office and apartment buildings, is going up along Paseo de la Reforma, with predictions that this will return the area to its former prestige.

[7] The Champs Elysees is a restaurant with more than 40 years in business, located on Paseo de la Reforma between Estocolmo and Amberes streets.

However, the area also hosts a large number of fast food restaurants such as McDonald's, Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts and Little Caesar's Pizza.

Each day, 440,000 people enter the area to work, shop, wander around or visit the many restaurants and nightclubs in the 2,100 business and offices located here.

Small-scale drug trafficking is common, with merchandise hidden in telephone booths, garden areas and street vendor stalls.

To combat crimes such as muggings, a special squad of "tourist police" now patrol the area, especially on less-travelled streets such as Praga, Toledo and Burdeos.

[7] New construction, especially along Paseo de la Reforma, continues the trend of change of use from residential to commercial, with fifty-one of its 99 blocks having been urbanized.

These include wine made infused with rat fetuses (Tianshuzaichiew), a sculpture of the tallest man in the world (Robert Wadlow) photographs of people and other artifacts.

Next to it is the Sagrado Corazon de Jesus Church, built by the Hungarian immigrant community on Plaza Giordano Bruno, in which the aristocracy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries attended mass.

[8] Other notable sites in the area include the Benjamin Franklin Library, and the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) building.

[10] Here, dozens of people handing out flyers stop pedestrians and drivers advertising gay bars and men's clubs, some of which operate illegally.

[15] It is also the site of the Corridor de Arte José Luis Cuevas, which occurs on weekends when an average of forty artists display their works for sale.

On this street area around forty sculptures created by young artists of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas of UNAM.

[10] During Gay Pride, the nightclubs, discothèques and bars of Zona Rosa fill with members of the LGBT community starting at midday.

[21] In 2005, the city created the Reforma-Centro Historico tourist route to connect the two areas; Zona Rosa and the historic center, and increase tourism in both.

When they became an economic powerhouse, especially Alsatians and Barcelonettes, they moved into the streets around the neighborhood with Second Empire mansions that reminded them of Parisian buildings.

Most immigrated to Mexico in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, as a result of commercial agreements signed by the Mexican government and those of Korea and Taiwan, allowing companies such as Daewoo to bring workers over from Asia.

However, according to some sources, such as Alfredo Romero, professor of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at UNAM, a large percentage of Koreans living in Mexico have questionable immigration status.