Palacio Postal

Today, my family and I took a walking tour of the Centro Historico in Mexico City. We saw a lot of beautiful buildings and places, including part of the Aztec ruins called Tenochtitlan, the House of Tiles, Palacio de Bellas Artes. and the main Mexico City Post Office, also known as Correo Mayor. The post office stood out to me because it is architecturally stunning and has one of many beautiful murals open to the public inside. 

When I walked into the post office, I just loved it already. It was beautiful and breathtaking. The construction of the building began in 1902, and took four years to complete. Everything in it was imported from Italy, including the gold shields along the staircase. Adamo Boari was the architectural designer who built the post office and the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Before it was a post office, it was a hospital that was falling apart. What is amazing, is that it is a working post office to this day! At Christmas, lots and lots of kids will line up to send letters to Santa.

One of my favorite parts of the post office is that in a separate room there is a mural made out of Mexican stamps from the 1800s. The mural represents the country’s symbol which is an eagle on a cactus with a snake in its mouth. The snake, eagle, and cactus were important symbols in Aztec culture. When they found them in what’s now known as Mexico City, they knew to build. 

In the background of the mural, there are two mountains; the one to the right of the eagle depicts the only active volcano in Mexico City, and the one to the left is a mountain where the snow on the top is in the shape of a woman. Our guide told us to use our imagination to look at it. If the first bump is the head, the second bump is her stomach - almost as if she is pregnant - and the third bump is her feet, it would look like a woman. As I already mentioned, the mural was made out of almost 32,000 stamps from the 1800s and took almost 5 years to collect. I thought that was fascinating and very interesting to know.