  These notes are the written version of two lectures delivered at the VIII
Mexican School on Particles and Fields on November 1998. The level of the notes
is basic assuming only some knowledge on Statistical Mechanics, General
Relativity and Yang-Mills theory. After a brief introduction to the classical
and semiclassical aspects of black holes, we review some relevant results on
2+1 quantum gravity. These include the Chern-Simons formulation and its affine
Kac-Moody algebra, the asymptotic algebra of Brown and Henneaux, and the
statistical mechanics description of 2+1 black holes. Hopefully, this
contribution will be complementary with the review paper hep-th/9901148 by the
same author, and perhaps, a shortcut to some recent developments in three
dimensional gravity.
