The Casa Azul on Londres 247 stood as a private home for half a century before it became a museum. Frida Kahlo was born there in 1907 and died there in 1954; the house opened to the public in 1958, its rooms left broadly as she used them. A Coyoacán day trip begins in that register of preserved domesticity, then widens outward. The district was a lakeshore settlement long before it was a borough of Mexico City, and its name comes from the Nahuatl for place of coyotes. Coyoacán served briefly as the valley's administrative seat in 1521, and the street grid still shows it. Low volcanic stone walls run the length of Avenida Francisco Sosa, among the oldest colonial streets on the continent. The Parroquia de San Juan Bautista, begun in the sixteenth century, anchors Plaza Hidalgo; the adjoining Jardín Centenario holds the twin-coyote fountain that gives the square its emblem. Bougainvillea spills over courtyard gates. Ash trees shade the Viveros nursery a few blocks west. Little here reaches above three storeys. Twelve kilometres south, Xochimilco preserves the other half of the same drowned geography. Its chinampas — rectangular farming plots raised from lake silt and anchored by willow roots — have been cultivated since pre-Hispanic times, and roughly 170 kilometres of canals still thread between them. UNESCO listed the zone in 1987. Flat-bottomed trajineras, painted in block colour and named after women, carry passengers along water that still shelters the axolotl. That shared lake inheritance is why Coyoacán day trip tours so often pair the two, and why an excursión de un día across both reads as one continuous story rather than two unrelated stops. The collections reward slow attention. In the Casa Azul, Kahlo's studio keeps her wheelchair drawn up to the easel and a mirror fixed above the four-poster bed. Painted plaster corsets hang nearby. The kitchen carries Diego y Frida spelled out in small ceramic cups, and the 2004 opening of a sealed bathroom released some 300 garments, now rotated through the wardrobe gallery. Diego Rivera's pre-Hispanic figures line the garden pyramid; folk retablos cover a stairwell wall. Two streets away, the Museo Casa de León Trotsky preserves the study where he was killed in 1940, desk calendar unturned. Travellers holding Coyoacán day trip tickets usually find these Mexico City landmarks within a ten-minute walk of one another.