[6][12] People come to enjoy the still somewhat rural atmosphere of the area as well as the large number of restaurants, cafes, cantinas, museums, bookstores and other cultural attractions.

[11] Vendors sell street food such as ice cream, homemade fruit drinks, esquites (flavored corn kernels) and corn-on-the-cob served with mayonnaise, lime, chili pepper and grated cheese, amaranth bars, and various candies.

The quantity of cars and the lack of traffic patrols have meant the proliferation of “franeleros” or people who illegally take possession of public areas such as streets to charge for parking.

What Cortés eventually built here where administrative buildings for the offices used to manage the vast lands he was granted as the Marquis del Valle de Oaxaca, which included the Coyoacán area.

When the borough of Coyoacán was created in 1928, as part of the Federal District, the building remained the government seat but of the modern “delegación.” The structure was declared a Colonial Monument by INAH in 1932.

The mural in the chapel was done by Diego Rosales in 1961, depicting the early history of Mexico with personages such as Cuauhtémoc, Cortés, La Malinche and Pedro de Alvarado.

[26] In 2005, the San Juan Bautista church underwent renovations to its tower, atrium, facade, portal for pilgrims, the north and south sides and the cupola and more under the supervision of INAH and academics from UNAM.

Coyoacán was ranked third best place to live in the country in 2004 by the United Nations Development Programme, behind Benito Juarez and San Pedro Garza García in Nuevo León.

[38] The oldest of these divisions are former villages which are distinguished by their colonial era churches and who still celebrate their feast of their patron saint much as they did when they were independent, with fireworks, masses, processions, folk and indigenous dance and more.

The festival begins with chamber music and then the patron image of the Virgin Mary is “awakened” with the song Las Mañanitas as she is surrounded by numerous floral arrangements for mass.

The mansion of the early twentieth century, illuminated by its glass windows, calls readers to walk among its high shelves of two floors and to know its wide range of titles.

[47] At the beginning of the 20th century, the Casa de Cultura Jesús Reyes Heroles was inhabited by María Concepción Armida, who is being considered for beatification by the Catholic Church.

[21][48] The complex also houses the Instituto del Derecho de Asilo y las Libertades Públicas (Institute for the Right of Asylum and Public Liberties) which was founded in 1990 and the Rafael Galván Library, which contains a collection of books with social themes.

[46] The Escuela Superior de Música (Higher School of Music) on Fernández Leal Street in Colonia Del Carmen is an imitation of the house occupied by Shakespeare's Othello.

The Mexicans, aided by the "Saint Patrick's Battalion", a military unit composed of catholic immigrants (mainly Irish), had fortified the monastery and fought until they ran out of ammunition and then beaten only after hand-to-hand combat.

The collection includes an American map of the facility from 1847, artifacts from the French Intervention in Mexico and a plot by Henry Lane Wilson to bring down the government of Francisco I. Madero in 1913.

[52] On 6 January in the Pueblo de los Reyes, the main square of the community is decorated with flower portals and "carpets" made by carefully arranging colored sawdust on the ground.

The El Niño Jesús and San Francisco barrios are filled with very winding alleyways over black volcanic rock, called pedregal, from an ancient eruption of Xitle.

The Aztecs gave the area its current name; however their rule was hated by the native Tepanecas, who welcomed Hernán Cortés and the Spanish, allowing them to use this southern port on Lake Texcoco as a headquarters during the conquest of Tenochtitlan.

The altepetl (town) of Coyoacán continued to assess tribute on the basis of the size of a person's land holdings long after Spaniards had switched to a head tax.

[7] From the rest of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, Coyoacán remained separate from Mexico City proper, keeping its rural reputation and gaining one for cantinas and pulque bars.

Over time, it attracted names such as Salvador Novo, Octavio Paz, Mario Moreno (aka Cantínflas), and Dolores del Río, exiles such as Leon Trotsky and Romania's King Carl, as well as its two most famous residents, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

The main street market, or tianguis, for the area was called Luis Mondragón, which set up each Friday where the Coyoacán gymnasium is now, selling foodstuff, domestic animals, and other necessities.

[30] By the mid 20th century, the urban sprawl of Mexico City began to envelop the borough, much as it was doing to other former villages and municipalities in the Federal District such as Tacuba, Tacubaya, Mixcoac and others.

[40] There are an estimated 250 franeleros working the borough, and in 2010, the city government proposed regulating them instead of eliminating them, which the residents of Coyoacán and neighboring San Angel have strongly rejected.

Designed by architects Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral, it was built in the 1950s to move the university from the scattered colonial buildings in the historic center of Mexico City.

It was designed by Mario Pani, Enrique del Moral and Salvador Ortega as a tower of glass and marble, decorated with three-dimensional murals by David Alfaro Siqueiros, mixing painting and sculpting.

This land once belonged to Miguel Angel de Quevedo, but they were nationalized under President Venustiano Carranza and today it serves as a park and a plant nursery for trees used in reforestation projects.

Today, it not only germinates and grows trees for reforestation projects, it is considered to be one of Mexico City's “lungs.” This and other areas serve to recharge aquifers and add oxygen to the air.

This building is one of the few built specifically to be a cultural center to serve the eastern side of the borough, which is densely populated due to apartment complexes such as the CTM Infonavit Culhuacan and the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria.