3 pubs checked · updated 25 October 2026

The oldest pub in Mexico City

By claim, the oldest cantina in Mexico City is La Peninsular in La Merced, which the Mexican press dates to 1872 and calls the oldest of the living ones — on the strength of a place in the city's register of cantina licences rather than of any licence anybody has produced. By evidence it is Bar La Ópera, whose move to Avenida 5 de Mayo in 1895 is the one pivot in the city's cantina story that three independent accounts agree on, and which began four years before that as a French pastry shop.

Mexico City dates its drinking houses by licences rather than by buildings, and that is the whole character of the evidence here. The cantina arrived as a licensed trade in the middle of the nineteenth century — the chronicler Salvador Novo counted eleven official cantinas in the city by then — and the age a house is known by is its number in that register: El Nivel was the first, La Peninsular the second, and when El Nivel closed in 2008 the title passed down a place. It is a measure nobody can check directly, because the register is quoted in every telling and reproduced in none — though it leaves one usable trace: El Nivel's licence number one was signed by Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, who became president in July 1872, which puts the first two licences in the early 1870s whatever the signs say. The buildings cannot settle it either: these are ground floors in a centre that has been rebuilt after earthquakes, remodelled by owners and renumbered by the city. What the capital does have, more than almost anywhere on this site, is continuity of trade with the proof in the room — a walnut bar said to have come up from New Orleans, floor tiles kept through a heavy refit, a bullet hole in a ceiling that everyone attributes to Pancho Villa and nobody can date. Three houses are listed here, and the oldest claim among them is the one with the least paper behind it.