Mexico · Ciudad de México · Mexico City
Coyoacán, Mexico City — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Coyoacán is a borough of Mexico City built around a colonial plaza, the Frida Kahlo Museum and the iglesia de San Juan Bautista.
About Coyoacán
Where to stay in Coyoacán
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Coyoacán sits south of central Mexico City, and most of its beds cluster around the twin colonial squares rather than in high towers. Base yourself by the twin plazas. Small hotels and guesthouses sit within walking reach of the iglesia de San Juan Bautista and the Frida Kahlo Museum, while the Copilco end near the university draws a younger, quieter crowd.
Weekend markets fill the plaza. Choose the old core for museums and cafés on foot.
About Coyoacán
What are the main landmarks in Coyoacán?
The Frida Kahlo Museum, the painter's cobalt-walled Casa Azul, anchors the borough's draw and sits a short walk from the Leon Trotsky House Museum where the exiled revolutionary was killed. Both are compact. Around the plaza stand the iglesia de San Juan Bautista, the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares and the El Carmen complex of former Carmelite cloisters, while the Cineteca Nacional screens film to the north.
Art fills the Carrillo Gil Art Museum too.
What is the history of Coyoacán?
Coyoacán served as Hernán Cortés's base after the fall of Tenochtitlan, and its old plaza and the iglesia de San Juan Bautista date from that early colonial century. The name is Nahuatl. Long a village apart from the capital, it became a formal borough of Mexico City in 1928, and its cobbled streets later drew artists and exiles, among them Frida Kahlo at the Casa Azul and Leon Trotsky, whose fortified house survives as a museum.
The Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones occupies a former convent nearby.
Where is Coyoacán?
Coyoacán lies on the flat volcanic ground south of the old lakebed of Mexico City, its centre a low grid of cobbled streets around two shaded plazas near the iglesia de San Juan Bautista.
Good for
More areas in Mexico City
Updated July 2026