Fun Facts about Mexico City

I love Mexico City and, for the blog this week, I thought I would put together and share some facts that I find interesting. I visit most years and have done since 1994 so I feel very much at home. I have seen the sangha grow and new situations set up. The biggest centre is still the one in La Roma, Mexico City while there are others in Cuernavaca, Toluca and Satelite with a group on Puebla. 

Mexico City is the capital and largest city of Mexico, as well as the most populous city in North America, roughly 9.2 million in the city and probably around 22 million in the greater metropolitan area. Located in the Valley of Mexico on the high Mexican Central Plateau, the city sits at an altitude of 2,240 meters (7,350 feet). Saddhajoti was telling me how altitude affects so many things like the plant life. Temperature drops roughly 6.5°C for every 1,000 metres you climb, so Mexico City's 2,240 metres buys it something like a 14–15°C discount on what its latitude would otherwise deliver. That's the whole secret of the place: at 19°N it would be Gulf-coast hot and humid at sea level; up on the plateau it's the "eternal spring" people write about. 

The air is thinner, and that matters to leaves as much as lungs. There are the same proportions of gases up there, just fewer molecules of everything — at Mexico City's elevation each breath brings in about a quarter less oxygen than at sea level. Plants face the same shortfall in carbon dioxide, and typically answer it with more stomata, denser tissue and thicker leaves, which is one reason high-altitude vegetation tends to grow slowly and live long. A quarter less oxygen! I notice that when I first arrive but then I get used to it. I remember someone visiting years ago and ending up having to have an oxygen tank. 

Altitude also shapes what people eat and grow. Thin air and cold nights make for slow ripening and dense flavour, which is why high-grown coffee and agave are so popular. In the Valley of Mexico the combination was decisive: the lake gave water and the altitude gave a temperate climate with no real frost, so the chinampas could produce several crops a year. That's the deeper reason a city of 200,000 people stood here in 1519, and why the jacarandas can turn the whole city lilac in March — a tree blooming at 2,240 metres on a latitude where the lowlands would never treat it so kindly.

Jacaranda tree

Mexico City is the oldest capital city in the Americas. I find it fascinating that it is one of only two founded by Indigenous peoples. The other is Quito, Ecuador. They make a nice pairing: Quito stands at 2,850 metres, higher than Mexico City, in an Andean valley below the volcano Pichincha, and it was founded by the Quitu people before the Inca took it over. Its historic centre and Kraków in Poland were the very first sites UNESCO ever inscribed as World Cultural Heritage, in 1978 — the same year workers digging near the Zócalo hit the Coyolxauhqui stone. Quito and Mexico City are the two capitals that grew from pre-Columbian cities rather than being laid out by Europeans.

Going back to Mexico City - it began as Tenochtitlan, a Mexica city built around 1325 on islands in Lake Texcoco. The name itself is Nahuatl, and nobody has settled what it means. México comes from Mēxihco, the Nahuatl name for the valley and the Mexica heartland. The most quoted reading splits it into metztli (moon) and xictli (navel), giving "in the navel of the moon" — apt for an island city in a lake that mirrored the sky — though the Nahuatl translator Miguel León-Portilla also read it from metl, the maguey, making it "in the navel of the maguey." Maguey is the agave plant that mescal is made from. The country took its name from the capital, not the other way round.  

Built on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco, much of Mexico City sits on clay that holds up to 94% water by volume, and subsidence in the worst areas has reached around 50 cm a year, with cumulative loss in some districts running to tens of metres over the past century. Groundwater pumping is the main accelerator — roughly 70% of the city's drinking supply comes from wells in the basin — and studies published in the Journal of Geophysical Research found most of the compaction is irreversible, because squeezed lakebed clay does not spring back. Even the Metro is affected, with nearly half its elevated sections experiencing uneven sinking. This also fascinates me - there’s an irony in the fact that the lake the Spanish tried to erase is still the most powerful thing under the city.  My advice - drink bottled water!

Beneath the Zócalo lies the city they buried. The Templo Mayor, the main Mexica temple, stood at the centre of the sacred precinct. This was torn down in 1521, and its stones were reused in the first construction of the Metropolitan Cathedral. It stayed lost for centuries until 1978, when electrical workers digging a trench struck an eight-tonne stone disc of a dismembered goddess, which triggered a five-year excavation. There are still objects being uncovered: a Mesoamerican ballcourt turned up under a hotel in 2017, and offerings including the skeleton of a boy dressed as Huitzilopochtli were found by the temple steps. 

I have seen these in the on-site Museo del Templo Mayor (inaugurated 1987, built to house the first season's 7,000-plus objects). There's a specific room for the god himself — Sala 4, Huitzilopochtli — and Sala 2 focuses on ritual and sacrifice. The Coyolxauhqui stone is there too, on the upper floor, a few metres from where the electrical workers hit it in 1978. If anyone reading this is thinking of a visit to Mexico, the museum is a place you must visit.  So is the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Chapultepec which holds the monumental pieces of Mexica sculpture — the Sun Stone above all.  Don’t try to do it in one visit - it’s enormous and absolutely packed with interesting stuff.  

Templo Mayor

Back to the present day.  I think it’s quite something that Aztec farming still feeds the city. In Xochimilco to the south, the chinampas — the so-called floating gardens, technically stationary raised beds on woven rafts anchored in shallow lake — are still worked by some 5,000 chinamperos across roughly 750 hectares. Xochimilco became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and its remaining canals are the last natural refuge of the axolotl, the Mexican salamander. Chapultepec, a retreat of Aztec rulers and now one of the largest parks in the Americas, holds Chapultepec Castle, one of only two royal castles in the Americas — the other, the Palace of Iturbide, is also in this city. It’s also worth a visit.

I sound like a tourist guide but it is a fascinating place full of interesting fun facts.

Here’s a good one:The eagle on the flag could be described as a real-estate instruction from a god. The legend has it that Huitzilopochtli told the wandering Mexica to settle where they saw an eagle on a prickly pear cactus with a serpent in its beak, and they found it on a small island in Lake Texcoco in 1325. The eagle stood for the sun god, and the Mexica called themselves the People of the Sun, while the cactus — nōchtli — represented the island itself and the snake carried wisdom and connections to Quetzalcoatl. 2025 marked seven hundred years since the founding, which the city celebrated with a major exhibition at the Templo Mayor Museum. 

Fun facts for foodies: Around 200 to 300 Nahuatl words entered Spanish, most of them foods, which then travelled into English: chocolate and cacao, tomato, avocado, chilli, chipotle, coyote, axolotl. 

Nahuatl has been spoken in central Mexico since at least the seventh century and is still a protected national language with something like 1.7 million speakers, the most of any indigenous language in Mexico. In the city's southern barrios — Milpa Alta in particular — ceremonies tied to the maize calendar and the ancestors run directly back to pre-Hispanic ritual, and the Otomí, who spoke something other than Nahuatl, may have been the valley's earliest inhabitants of all. 

Here’s a fact to end - the Spanish built their capital on top of the Mexica one, and five centuries on, the ground, the name, the language and the food have all stayed Mexica.