Monterrey: the mountain watching over the city

The Cerro de la Silla, a limestone mountain owing its name to its saddle-shaped form, can be admired from various city viewpoints without necessarily undertaking its climb.

The Macroplaza, among the world's largest urban plazas, brings together the Baroque Cathedral, the Government Palace and the Faro del Comercio, an orange tower designed by architect Luis Barragán.

The Parque Fundidora, a former defunct steel mill from the nineteen-eighties now converted into a public park, preserves the original blast furnaces alongside a steel museum and cycling paths along industrial canals.

The Barrio Antiguo, the colonial neighborhood of the historic center, alternates low stone buildings with bars and art galleries housed in the same eighteenth-century structures.

Barragán's Faro del Comercio and the blast furnaces preserved at Fundidora tell the same industrial ambition of the city, expressed in two completely different languages: one minimalist, the other brutally functional.

Cerro de la Silla, indifferent to both, remains in the background exactly as it was before Monterrey became an industrial capital.