Mexico City Travel Guide (Mexico City, Mexico)

The victorious Spanish systematically smashed every visible aspect of the old culture, as often as not using the very stones of the old city to construct the new, and building a new palace for Cortés on the site of the Aztec emperor's palace. A few decades ago it was thought that everything was lost; slowly, however, particularly during construction of the Metro and in the remarkable discovery of remains of the Templo Mayor beneath the colonial Zócalo, remains of Tenochtitlán have been brought to light.

The new city developed slowly in its early years, only attaining the level of population that the old had enjoyed at the beginning of the twentieth century. It spread far wider, however, as the lake was drained, filled and built over - only tiny vestiges remain today - and grew with considerable grace. In many ways it's a singularly unfortunate place to site a modern city. Pestilent from the earliest days, the inadequately drained waters harboured fevers, and the native population was constantly swept by epidemics of European diseases. Many of the buildings, too, simply began to sink into the soft lake bed, a process probably accelerated by regular earthquakes. You'll see old churches and mansions leaning at crazy angles throughout the centre, and though repairs to buildings damaged by the disastrous earthquake of September 1985 are long complete, several empty shells remain standing.

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the city comprised little more than the area around the Zócalo and Alameda. Chapultepec Castle, Coyoacán, San Ángel, and the Basilica of Guadalupe - areas now well within city limits - were then surrounded by fields and the last of the basin's former lakes. Nonetheless, the city was beginning to take its present shape: the Paseo de la Reforma already linked Chapultepec with the city, and the colonial core could no longer accommodate the increasing population. From late 1870 through to 1911 the dictator Porfirio Díaz presided over an unprecedented, and self-aggrandizing, building programme which saw the installation of trams, the expansion of public transport and the draining of some of the last sections of the Lago de Texcoco which had previously hemmed in the city. Jointly these fuelled further growth, and by the outbreak of the Revolution in 1910, Mexico City's residents numbered over four hundred thousand