Gentle Tours - 11550 Ciudad de México

Standing in front of the magnificent opera house of Mexico City, known as Palacio de Bellas Artes you can feel what XX Centuries of architectural wonders weight on the shoulders of those who have designed spaces for living, working or enjoying music: the need to create massive, flamboyant, palatial constructions.

But architecture also reflects what this country has gone through: crisis, revolutions, cultural disruptions and philosophical contradictions. Side by side it is possible to observe a mix of styles, materials and heights, all of them bathed in hard UV rays but at the same time sinking or leaning like in a distoptic film.

Baroque details emerge almost everywhere. When the Catholic Counter Reform declared its aesthetic principles, New Spain embraced them with passion and commissioned some of the most outstanding churches you can imagine. Entering, for example, La Enseñanza chapel you are transported to the heaven Ignacio Loyola imagined for those who practiced spiritual exercises, and architecture is one of the most sublime of all because it conveys religious messages, and therefore needed to be integrated with paintings and sculptures.