Hoteliers, chefs and architects redefine Mexico in the eyes of the world

Mexico has experienced many post-colonial revolutions. Today, two centuries  after Independence, there’s another one, spurred on by innovative local chefs, hoteliers, architects, designers, eco-vintners and craft distillers who are redefining Mexican identity – many, like those national figureheads Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, reclaiming their indigenous roots.

It is to experience this maverick energy that I am taking a road journey from Mexico City, now considered one of the safest in South America, to the colonial heartlands into the dynamic Bajío area, and up through the Western Sierra Madre mountains to the Pacific coast.

I am staying in Polanquito, the bohemian part of Polanco DF’s luxury southern district, a placid enclave of boutiques and award-winning restaurants – Mexico is home to 10 of the 50 best in Latin America – where traffic obligingly stops on the grand avenidas when I step in the road. Here the well-heeled sip organic hot chocolate or saunter with chihuahuas through the adjoining Chapultepec Forest where gold Monarch butterflies flit like marigold petals through ancient woodland of silvery Montezuma cypress trees. The emperor’s former garden is now one of the largest city parks in the world.

Above this buried empire, two recently erected “pyramids” have established Polanco as the new luxury capital of Latin America. El Palacio de Hierro is a 253,000sq ft haute-fashion temple in an imposing Aztec-inspired complex designed by Javier Sordo Madaleno Bringas, son of Mexican  modernist Juan Sordo Madaleno.

And Museo Soumaya, Mexico’s very own Taj Mahal, is a dumbbell-shaped structure of hexagonal aluminium tiles  built by telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim Helú in honour of his eponymous late wife.

The gallery, which houses his art collection, is a family affair designed by his son-in-law  architect Fernando Romero, with whom Norman Foster  has partnered on Mexico City’s new airport, due to be the  most sustainable one in the world.

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Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/