Chapultepec Castle

This guide to Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City opens with the hill's fresh springs, carried to Tenochtitlan by a Mexica aqueduct in the 1460s to keep the island capital alive. It follows the centuries-old cypresses the Aztecs planted on this sacred ground, and the Spanish viceroy who began a palace here in 1785, a build that took nearly eighty years, a war, and a doomed emperor to finish. A British traveler named James Elton stood near this same spot in 1867 and called the view unsurpassed anywhere in the world.