Santa Fe, Mexico City — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Santa Fe?

Commerce sets the skyline here. Centro Santa Fe anchors the district as the largest mall in Latin America, and Parque La Mexicana carves an open green from the old quarried ground beside the office towers. Learning has a foothold too.

The Universidad Iberoamericana and the Santa Fe campus of Tecnológico de Monterrey draw students into the corporate grid, and the Universidad Panamericana keeps its own place among the western blocks, while Avenida Vasco de Quiroga carries traffic past the glass fronts toward Cuajimalpa.

What is the history of Santa Fe?

The name reaches back to 1532. Santa Fe carries the memory of Santa Fé de México, the pueblo hospital that Vasco de Quiroga founded on the western slopes above Mexico City. Sand mines came later.

Through the middle of the last century the quarries were dug out and then filled as a dump, until the pits were levelled and the ground reborn as a business district, its skyline crowded with towers around Centro Santa Fe and its slopes softened by the lawns of Parque La Mexicana. The Universidad Iberoamericana arrived in 1982 and set the academic tone.

Where is Santa Fe?

Santa Fe spreads across the western hills of Mexico City, straddling the boroughs of Cuajimalpa and Álvaro Obregón, its towers set on ground once quarried for sand.