La Peninsular, Mexico City

The claim

A corner cantina in La Merced, a few streets east of the Zócalo, with beams and floor tiles kept through a heavy remodelling in 2013 and an orchestra at weekends. The press dates it to 1872 and calls it the oldest of the city's living cantinas, on the strength of a licence register nobody has produced. Its ground floor was the main set for El Callejón de los Milagros in 1995.

What the records show

The year is the press's, not the house's. El Financiero, visiting on 15 November 2025, says the cantina opened in 1872 and is four years older than Bar La Ópera; México Desconocido, Uno TV and the trade press say 1872 too, and all of them rest the claim on the same thing — not a founding document but a place in a register. The story they tell is that El Nivel held the city's first cantina licence and La Peninsular the second, and that when El Nivel closed in 2008 this house became the oldest of the living ones. Nobody has produced either licence, the numbers are quoted without a reference, and one guide dates this one to 1871 rather than 1872 and attributes that year to the city government, so the year is a well-travelled claim rather than a record and the grade says so. One cross-check does support the early 1870s, and it comes from the house that held licence number one. El Nivel's licence, its proudest possession, was signed by Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, who did not become president until July 1872 — so whatever El Nivel's own sign said about 1857, the first licence cannot predate the summer of 1872, which puts the second one within months of the year this house claims. That is an argument about plausibility rather than a document for 1872, and it is the strongest thing anybody has for the date. What is better attested is the trade. The cantina serves beers, cocktails, tequila, mezcal and liquors with peanuts and botanas at the counter and a kitchen behind it, and an orchestra at weekends, so a drink without a meal is not in question. Three other things are worth a reader's time, each with its own weight. The film: the ground floor was the main location for El Callejón de los Milagros in 1995, the one picture Salma Hayek made in Mexico. The room: it was remodelled in 2013 — México Desconocido names the engineer and says furniture and fittings were lost, while the beams, the tiles and the doors are the surviving original work. And the admission: a Mexico City cantina guide reports that women were let in only after the Federal District government ordered mixed access in 1982, which, if a document is ever produced for it, is the kind of date that says more about the trade than a founding year. México Desconocido calls the building nearly five hundred years old and sets it where the Mexicaltzingo canal ran; it cites nothing for either, and nothing traced dates the fabric. The trading is believed rather than confirmed, and the reason is plain: the newest dated account of the house anybody has published is that El Financiero visit of November 2025, eleven months before this reading. Mexico keeps no public register of licensed premises that answers from here, the cantina publishes no site of its own, and the Chilango issue of September 2026 and Time Out's cantina route of August 2026 are both behind formats that could not be read, so neither could be checked for a mention.

What to look for inside

The main location for El Callejón de los Milagros, 1995
Beams, floor tiles and doors kept through the 2013 remodelling
An orchestra plays at weekends

Visiting

La Peninsular is in Mexico City, Mexico, at Alhóndiga 26, Local 4, Centro Histórico, Ciudad de México 06060. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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