Chapultepec is the great green lung of Mexico City — a forested park covering more than 650 hectares, twice the size of New York's Central Park, rising over the western end of the Paseo de la Reforma. The name means "hill of the grasshopper" in Nahuatl, and the rocky hill at its heart has been a retreat for the city's rulers since Aztec times. Today it is where Mexico City comes to breathe: families pour in at weekends for the lake, the zoo, the fairground and the shaded paths.
The park is also the city's museum district. Chapultepec Castle crowns the hill — the only royal castle in the Americas, briefly home to the Habsburg emperor Maximilian, and now the National History Museum with sweeping views back down Reforma. At the foot of the hill the world-class National Museum of Anthropology holds the treasures of pre-Columbian Mexico, while the Museo Tamayo and the Museo de Arte Moderno cover twentieth-century and contemporary art nearby.
The first section, nearest the city, is the busiest and holds most of the sights; the quieter second and third sections stretch west into woodland and gardens. Reforma runs along the northern edge, lined with skyscrapers and the monuments that mark the boundary between the park and the smart neighbourhoods of Polanco and Juárez.