Jardin Centenario

This guide to Jardin Centenario in Mexico City's Coyoacan neighborhood opens with the weekend chess games regulars play on its benches, then traces the ground beneath them back to its life as the walled atrium of the church and monastery of San Juan Bautista, opened as a public garden in 1921 under President Porfirio Diaz for independence's centennial. It follows the bronze coyote fountain at its center back to Coyoacan's Nahuatl name and the animal's place in Aztec cosmology. Come by evening, when street musicians and craft stalls fill the paths around the benches.