Many first-time visitors arriving at Mexico City airport experience an urge to jump straight back on to the plane. The combination of urban sprawl, brown, soupy pollution and a tangle of motorways is indeed off-putting. But, luckily, most tourists and business travellers persevere, making their way to leafier districts such as Polanco and Condesa, where pavement cafés, fashionable shops and museums offer a civilised respite from the edgy, heaving city.

And the city itself contains a number of world-class, must-see attractions such as the National Anthropology Museum’s celebrated Aztec calendar, carved in 1479 and dedicated to the sun, the principal Aztec deity; the historic centre including the National Palace, the cathedral and the city’s main arts centre, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, which is adorned with murals by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros; the Blue House where the painter Frida Kahlo lived and the Trotsky Museum where the Russian revolutionary was assassinated in 1940 by a Stalinist agent, both located in the colonial-styled Coyoacan neighbourhood. And any visit should certainly take in the impressive Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacan, an easy bus or taxi ride just north-east of the Distrito Federal, or DF, as locals call the capital.