Where to stay in Mexico City: the best neighbourhoods and hotels

Polanco is where Mexico City puts on a pressed shirt. Avenida Presidente Masaryk is the city's answer to Bond Street, the side streets are lined with embassies and restaurants you need to book well ahead, and little Lincoln Park gives the dog-walkers somewhere to parade. It feels calm, orderly and a long way from the chaos of the centre.

The southern edge runs into Chapultepec Park, which means the National Anthropology Museum, the best single reason to visit the city, is close enough to walk to, along with the National Auditorium and Paseo de la Reforma. Hotels range from high-rise five-stars facing the park to intimate townhouses with a couple of dozen rooms tucked between Masaryk and Lincoln Park. Skip it if you want street life and scruffy charm; choose it if you want everything to work.

Paseo de la Reforma is the city's showpiece boulevard: wide, tree-lined, dotted with monuments and crowned by the golden Angel of Independence. Stay here and you are in the middle of the map. Chapultepec and its museums lie at one end, the historic centre at the other, and Roma and Condesa are just to the south.

This is big-hotel territory, with spas, pools and rooms looking down the avenue, but there is character too. One of the area's hotels has been welcoming guests since 1907 and wears its antiques like a small museum; another sits in a neoclassical building a few steps from the Angel. Behind the avenue, the Zona Rosa and Juárez supply the bars, late restaurants and noise, which is handy or a nuisance depending on your bedtime.

Condesa is the city at its most liveable. Its streets curve around Parque México, a 1920s park of palms, fountains and dog-walkers, and the buildings are a catalogue of Art Deco curves and wrought-iron balconies. Under the trees you will find galleries, boutiques and more cafés than seems commercially sensible.

Hotels here are small and design-led rather than grand. Think a fifteen-room Art Deco boutique a few steps from the park, a spa hotel beside the same greenery, or an early twentieth-century building with a sushi bar on the fourth floor. It suits couples and anyone who likes to explore on foot. Light sleepers should ask for a room off the street: Condesa enjoys its evenings.

Next door to Condesa and a shade grittier, Roma Norte is where the city comes to eat. Its turn-of-the-century mansions, some immaculate and some gloriously peeling, now house restaurants, bakeries, mezcal bars and bookshops, and the broad avenue of Álvaro Obregón runs through the middle with a tree-shaded walkway down its spine.

Places to stay lean towards stylish apartments and small hotels, including one set in a nineteenth-century building where the old architecture has been given a sharp contemporary fit-out. It is ideal for solo travellers and couples who plan their days around lunch. Families after a pool and a kids' menu will be happier on Reforma or in Polanco.

The historic centre is Mexico City turned up to full volume. The Zócalo, one of the largest squares in the world, is flanked by the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace; the ruins of the Aztec Templo Mayor sit just behind; and the white marble Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Alameda park are a walk to the west. You could fill three days without catching a taxi.

Stay here for the sights and the atmosphere, in a late nineteenth-century hotel right on the south side of the square if you can. Be realistic about the trade-off: the streets are crowded by day and quieter than you might like late at night, and the best restaurants are a ride away in Roma and Polanco.

Santa Fe is the city's corporate district, a cluster of steel-and-glass towers on the western hills with one of the country's biggest shopping centres at its heart. The hotels are modern, well equipped and often very good, with spas, indoor pools and a choice of restaurants under one roof.

Come here if you have meetings here. For a holiday it is the wrong side of a long, slow drive from Chapultepec, Roma and the old centre, and there is little to see on foot. If the choice is yours, stay central.

Benito Juárez International Airport sits inside the city, to the east of the centre, and its hotels are properly convenient. One is linked to Terminal 1 by a covered footbridge, with a free round-the-clock shuttle to Terminal 2. Others are a five-minute drive away, close to the Foro Sol and the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, which is useful if you are in town for a concert or the Grand Prix.

It is a practical choice for a late arrival or a dawn departure, not a base for sightseeing: the historic centre is around 25 minutes by car when the roads behave.