Garden Santa Fe

Fotos: Santiago Ruiz de Ch. y Ordnajela13,  Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 y 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Garden Santa Fe is a newer shopping center in crowded the crowded Santa Fe business district in Mexico City’s west. It’s widely acclaimed for the innovative design. Shops are arranged around three sunken areas leaving the ground level for gardens and open space. The garden has in fact come to be something of a neighborhood favorite.

The shopping center opened in 2014. Above ground, there’s a park, a theater, and office buildings. On the lower levels are about 90 retail shops. There’s also an indoor go-kart track and a number of good chain restaurants.

The Garden Santa Fe was designed by Francisco Martín del Campo (B, 1957). Trained at the Universidad Anahuac, he graduated in 1981. He’s best-known in these pages for the work he did on Chapultepec Uno, the Paseo de la Reforma skyscraper completed in 2019.

The shopping center is technically on the western edge of the colonia Zedec Santa Fe in Alcaldía Álvaro Obregón. (Remember, not all of Santa Fe is in Cuajimalpa.) The open garden area of the shopping center is just about caddy-corner from the main campus of the Ibero university.

The Capital Bus Reforma Santa Fe stop is just across the Calle Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena. It’s part of Capital’s seasonal Santa Fe tour that runs just in December, July, August and during Semana Santa of each year. Passengers disembarking here get access to the shopping center and to some of Santa Fe’s most densely developed territory.