Metro Hospital 20 de Noviembre

Metro Hospital 20 de Noviembre is on Line 12 of the Mexico City Metro, between the avenues Insurgentes Sur and Zapata.

• The Metro station is named for the famous national medical center. In its turn, the hospital was named to commemorate the traditional beginning of the Mexican Revolution. November 20th, still a national holiday, marks the date that the Plan de San Luis Potosi called for armed insurrection against the Porfirio Díaz presidency in 1910.

The hospital was later conceived as the center of a network of public (ISSSTE, the Mexican social security administration) hospitals and forty-eight clinics around Mexico City. The network was put together in the 1960s and most of its facilities are still in operation. The first ISSSTE hospital was a building, here, that had been bought by the ISSSTE. It was converted into the Hospital 20 de Noviembre in 1961. With that conversion, it was re-opened with some 600 beds, modern equipment, a nursery, and a four-level parking lot. It was the work of architects Enrique and Agustín Landa Verdugo. ISSSTE, then the Directorate of Civil and Retirement Pensions, had commissioned architect Mario Pani to build the Centro Urbano Presidente Alemán (CUPA) immediately to the south of the site. The southern entrance/exit to the Metro is on the CUPA grounds. That housing complex had been finished in 1949. The hospital is still considered a very significant work of 20th-century Mexican architecture.

The name of the hospital was changed to Centro Médico Nacional 20 de Noviembre in 1994. It’s remained one of Mexico’s leading hospitals every since.

Metro Hospital 20 de Noviembre is today practically in the geographical center of the city. With the colonia Del Valle V to the immediate north, and Del Valle VII to the south and east, it’s understandable that “Metro Del Valle” had long been planned as the name for the station.