Mexico City

The best value in this guide by a wide margin: world-class museums for the price of a coffee and a mural programme painted on the walls of working ministries.

Mexico City holds more museums than any city in the Americas and prices almost all of them at a few euros. The National Museum of Anthropology is the single most impressive building on this list: a modernist courtyard with a concrete umbrella, holding the Aztec sun stone, the Maya rooms and an ethnographic floor that most visitors never reach because they run out of daylight.

The murals are the other reason to come. After the revolution the state commissioned Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros to paint history on the walls of public buildings, and those buildings still function: you walk past a security desk, through a courtyard, and there is a forty-metre painted argument about the conquest, free of charge, with civil servants walking underneath it.

The contemporary scene is the most energetic in Latin America. Zona Maco in February turns the city into an art week, the galleries of Roma and Condesa sit in Art Deco houses with their original tiles, and the independent spaces programme work that reaches Europe two years later.