Bucareli

On the streets of Bucareli the newspaper Excelsior was born, politics was argued and ideas were forged. The history of this important Mexico City promenade begins in the seventeenth century, and it owes its name to the viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursua, who inaugurated it in 1778.

Bucareli, walked by millions of people across the centuries, keeps a life that recalls its earliest chronicles, when it was a tree-lined stretch of ahuehuetes and ash trees where every social class converged.

Among the living witnesses of the carriages that rolled along it, the demonstrations that crossed it and the writers and journalists who inhabited it, the Reloj Chino still stands — a gift from a distant diplomacy — along with the Edificio La Gaona, the second multi-family condominium built in the city. La Gaona was bought by the bullfighter Rodolfo Jiménez Gaona with the intention of housing families connected to bullfighting.

Over time Bucareli became a kaleidoscopic stretch and a witness to crucial events. The Ejército Trigarante entered here in 1821 to consummate Independence; it was the stage of the Decena Trágica and of the cannon fire that struck the Reloj Chino; it saw figures such as Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara pass by, poets like Octavio Paz and Ramón López Velarde, and it was the cradle of literary movements such as infrarrealismo.

Once the elegant heart of a city in transformation, Bucareli is now more chaotic, more battered, but also more alive. On its sidewalks, broken and glorious histories live side by side, and both remain essential to understanding the restless history of the Mexican capital.