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Travel Story

Teothuacan and Tenochtitlan

Beneath the sprawling megalopolis of Mexico City lie the temples and ghosts of ancient civilizations

When we checked in at Cancun airport and picked up our boarding passes for Mexico City. I fully expected to say goodby to sunshine and fresh air and steeled myself for a week of lung-searing smog. But when we arrived two and a half hours later Mexico's notoriously polluted capital city was bathed in bright sunshine. A dusting of fresh snow covered the surrounding hills and Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl the two towering volcanoes, east of the city, were etched against a clear blue sky. A freak storm had cleared out the smog and for the next three days the air was cool, fresh, and clear – the way it must have been thousands of years ago when the Valle de Mexico, the place where Mexico City now stands, was covered by the shallow waters of Lago de Texcoco.

Human settlers were drawn to the lake as early as 10,000 years ago and by 200 B.C. the surrounding highland valley had become a thriving agricultural area with dozens of small independent villages. By the 5th century A.D. the planned city of Teothuacan had been built 25 km northeast of the lake. With an estimated population of 125,000 people it was the biggest of Mexico's pre-Hispanic cities but, in the 7th century A.D., before the Aztecs or the Spanish arrived, Teothuacan was plundered, burned, and abandoned.

The magnificent grid-plan city of Teothuacan once covered an area of 20 square km and although only a portion of this has been restored the size and complexity of the site are truly awesome. Standing in the Plaza de la Luna at the foot of the Pyramid of the Moon we are surrounded by 12 massive temple platforms, each with a steep, stone stairway facing the square. From the Plaza the broad Calzada de los Muertos (Avenue of the Dead) runs, straight as an arrow for two kilometers, past the Pyramid of the Sun to the Templo de Quetzalcoatl with its stone carvings of sharp-fanged feathered serpents.

The massive 70 metre high Pyramid del Sol is the world's third largest pyramid. We climbed its 248 steps for a spectacular overview of the entire ancient city. Below us the great buildings along the Avenue of the Dead are laid out in perfect geometric order. The broad street owes its morbid name to the Aztecs who mistook the buildings for massive tombs built by giants for departed rulers. Today Teothuacan is an intensely studied archeological site and researchers believe the buildings were, in fact, apartment complexes where the priests in charge of Sun worship lived.

Before leaving the site we visited a nearby craft market where local artisans, perhaps distant relatives of those who toiled in Teothuacan, were busy fashioning replicas of ancient carvings. Working with a high-speed diamond wheel a dust-covered carver told us it would take several days to complete the obsidian figure he was fashioning. The original was also made of obsidian, that hard black volcanic glass that breaks to a razor sharp edge, but its maker had no diamond grinder, not even any metal tools. How it was done remains as much a mystery as how a people without even the simplest of machines, not even the wheel, could build the three million ton Pyramid of the Sun.

No one knows what happened to the people who built and lived in Teothuacan. When the first Aztecs stumbled across it in the 13th century A.D. the city had been abandoned for hundreds of years. Believing it to be the place where the Gods had sacrificed themselves to start the sun moving, the crumbling ruins were revered as a place of worship and became a pilgrimage site for Aztec priests and royalty. In fact several of the Teothuacan gods, Quetzacoatl (symbol of fertility) and Tlaloc (water god), were adopted by the Aztecs who continued to worship them until Christianity was introduced by the Spanish almost a millennium later.

But the Aztecs built their own city, Tenochtitlan, on an island near the western shore of Lake Texcoco, near what is now the Plaza de la Constitucion, or "Zolaco", in the very heart of downtown Mexico City. According to legend the site for Tenochtitlan was chosen when homeless Aztecs, wandering around the swampy fringes of Lago de Texcoco, spotted an eagle perched on a cactus and eating a snake. It was the omen they had been searching for – a signal from the god Huitzilopochtil that this is where they should stop their wandering and build their city. Today the crest on the Mexican flag, an eagle perched on a cactus and eating a snake, is still the symbol of modern Mexico.

When Hernan Cortes led his small army of Spanish invaders into Tenochtitlan in 1519 he was amazed to find a splendid island city with a network of canals and three massive causeways linking it to the mainland. It had hundreds of temple complexes and at its heart the double pyramid of the teocalli, a sacred precinct dedicated to the water god Tlaloc. With a population of 200,000 it was larger than any city in Spain at that time, and the surrounding Valle de Mexico was, even then, one of the world's most densely populated urban areas.

Unfortunately for the Aztecs their leader, Moctezuma II, believed that Cortes was the feathered serpent God Quetzalcoatl. He was welcomed into the city and treated as befitted a god. Six months later Moctezuma was taken hostage. The tiny group of conquistadors brought new diseases and recruited a cadre of mercenaries to their new religion. By 1521, only two years after Cortes’ arrival, Tenochititlan was shattered, its Aztec idols and temples destroyed, and most of its people reduced to slaves.

Now, standing in the vast open plaza of the Zolaco, surrounded by ornate colonial buildings, it’s hard to imagine that this was once the religious and power centre of the Aztec empire. Almost nothing remains of Tenochtitlan. A portion of the Templo Mayor (Great Temple) of the Aztec's sacred precinct, has been excavated and restored on its original location in the heart of downtown Mexico City. It is thought to be on the exact spot where the Aztecs saw their symbolic eagle. But most of what is known about the ancient city is based on Spanish chronicles.

After visiting the Templo Mayor we spent several hours in the nearby Palecio National, admiring the huge Diego Rivera murals depicting the "History of Mexico". In one corner a view of the great Aztec city as it was before the Spanish conquest; in another, the image of a blue-eyed child in the arms of a native woman symbolizes the mixing of the races and the emergence of modern Mexico. Today most Mexicans are mestizo, of mixed European and indigenous ancestry. But Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, is still revered as a hero while Cortes, painted by Diego as a grotesque, green-skinned caricature, is seen as a villain and his collaborators as traitors.

From our hotel in the Zona Rosa it was an easy walk along the Paseo de la Reforma to the National Museum of Anthropology. Like so many of Mexico City's new buildings the museum is a masterpiece of innovative design – as much a work of art as a functional building. Its two-storey display halls face an inner courtyard with an immense umbrella-like stone fountain. Both inside and out the building has a sense of spaciousness and light. Its uncluttered exhibits, arranged along more than a kilometre of hallways, are dedicated to the cultures and civilizations before the Spanish conquest.

In the few hours we had at the museum it was impossible to see more than a tiny fraction of the magnificent displays so we concentrated on Teotihuacan, and Tenochtitlan – the two city states that once occupied the Valle de Mexico. The Teotihuacan Hall has a scale model of the ancient city with its two awesome pyramids and the Tenochtitlan Room features an immense painting of the Aztec’s island city. Both rooms display artifacts recovered from the two sites during years of archeological exploration.

As we walked back to the Zona Rosa, past ornate Spanish Colonial buildings, towering glass skyscrapers, and streets choked with exhaust-spewing cars, I tried to imagine the Valle de Mexico when it was a fertile highland valley with abundant lakes, rivers, and forests – before it became the ecological disaster that is Mexico City. In many ways its an unlikely place for a huge urban centre – earthquake prone, bad air circulation, subsidence and unstable ground, water shortages – yet people continue to stream into it, searching, like the Teothuacana and Aztecs before them, for a better place to live. But, sadly, the things that attracted the first humans to settle here no longer exist.