La ciudad de Mexico

Mexico City. Second Largest city in the world.
Home to 20million people.
Within the valley lives Carlos Slim, a man whose wealth is second only to Bill Gates.

The surrounding mountains are encrusted with the heart-achingly drab infrastructure of concrete slums, conveniently inoffensive in being obscured by the thick soup of smog that hangs in the air.


The indigenous inhabitants of Mexico City were the Aztecs. It was a sort of Venice-like city of islands in the middle of a huge lake. Volcanic mountains insulated the valley.

So, Cortez arrived in 1519 and King Montezuma believed he was the prophesised bearded, white skinned God Quetzalcoatl. Perhaps it's because of the King's beliefs, that the great empire fell so swiftly to those few European conquerers.

The Spanish drained the lake and built on it, enslaving and killing and spreading the word of God as they went. A bit of a problem now as the buildings are now sinking. The undergound aquifer has been tapped into to such a degree that some parts of the city have sunk 10 metres.

In the next photo you can see in the background the cathedral built by the Spanish. It was built symbolically directly on top of Montezuma's Aztec temple. In the foreground lie the only remaining visible ruins of the Aztec pyramids. It was destroyed and the stones used to build the Catholic cathedral.

The whole city is built on top of the Aztec city. As in, buried beneath the city streets are pre-hispanic constructions. It's possible to excavate, but the colonial buildings are culturally significant aswell. And so the debate continues. Which is more worthy of preservation?

Just to compound the multitude of issues facing this place, it lies in an area of frequent seismic activity. Earthquakes happen everyday apparently, but not significant ones. It's scary to think about what will happen if, and probably when the next big disaster occurs. The millions clinging onto the mountains don't stand a chance. Really terrible...