Mexico City  - Only five US presidents have visited Mexico City in the past 100 years, but one more name will be added to the list Thursday with the arrival of President Barack Obama.

Obama is set to visit the city, which was once ancient Tenochtitlan - the former capital of the Aztec civilization, on Thursday, 12 years after the last visit of then-president Bill Clinton. The city is today the second-largest in the world in terms of population, with 19 million people in its metropolitan area.

The only residents of the White House to have visited the Mexican capital so far are Harry Truman in 1947, John F Kennedy in 1962, Lyndon Johnson in 1966, Jimmy Carter in 1979 and Bill Clinton in 1997.

William H Taft attended the first official meeting between the presidents of Mexico and the United States in 1909 in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and other US presidents have also preferred other Mexican cities, like Monterrey, Presa Falcon, Acapulco, Ciudad Acuna, Merida, San Francisco del Rincon, Los Cabos or Cancun. (dpa)