I recently read Conquistador, about Cortes’ conquest of the Aztec empire.
I hadn’t realised that the Aztec cities were built on and around a major lake system.
So what happened to the lakes? Mexico City isn’t on lakes now?
It was a very shallow lake. Mexico City suffered from regular flooding before 1700. After that the increased population and cultivation and natural forces saw the lakes recede, much like Tulare Lake in California. So modern Mexico City is on lakebed, not lake. Everything’s been filled in over the centuries.
And the city is subsiding as the aquifer below it collapses.
Stranger
Pretty good potted history and summary of current issues here:
It is weird to wander around there and see some of the highly local subsidence; it is not at all a smooth flat process.
I wondered about the logistics of feeding a huge population without beasts of burden or wagons to haul in food. The answer provided in another thread mentioned that the Aztec city was built around high yield multi-crop islands which turned much of the lake into an array of rectangular canals around these islands. You can still see some of these canal gardens south of the city (it shows up as Trajineras Xochimilco Mágico on Google maps.) So presumably some of the result was from filling in the lakebed over time to make gardens, also.
Interesting reconstruction of the old city:
Fascinating! Thanks very much for that link.
That’s really impressing. I can’t assess the accuracy of the reimagination, but now I can understand how impressed Cortez and his men were by the city, something that must have looked like a dream to them. I imagined something similar to this from the descriptions I read about Tenochtitlan, but not in that scale.