How many people live in the Mexico City metropolitan area?
Guess before you scroll — the answer is below
The answer
22,000,000 people
Roughly 22M.
Greater Mexico City holds about 22 million people, making it the largest metropolitan area in the Americas — bigger than New York or São Paulo. It sits on the drained bed of a lake at 7,350 feet, and parts of the city are sinking by up to 20 inches a year.
How to get close to this number
Work from the country and the primate share. This country has around a hundred and thirty million people, and this site's companion question says roughly one in five lives in this metropolitan area. A fifth of a hundred and thirty million gives the answer directly, and the two questions check each other.
The ranking is what surprises people: this is the largest metropolitan area in the Americas, ahead of both New York and São Paulo. Northern-hemisphere readers tend to assume the largest American cities are in the United States, and the actual ranking of urban agglomerations across the hemisphere looks nothing like that assumption.
The geology in the explanation is the extraordinary part. The city sits on the drained bed of a lake at altitude, and parts of it are sinking by up to half a metre a year as groundwater is extracted from the soft sediment beneath. A metropolitan area of this size on subsiding lakebed is an engineering problem with no clean solution, and the subsidence rate is one of the fastest measured anywhere.
Where this number comes from
| Source | United Nations World Urbanization Prospects |
|---|---|
| Figure refers to | 2023 |
| Last checked | |
| Unit | people |
Numbers move. If this one has drifted from its source, let us know.
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