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Mexico City
Mexico's vast high-altitude capital, built on a drained Aztec lake
Mexico City rises more than two kilometers above the sea on the bed of a lake the Aztecs once ruled, a megacity of more than twenty million in a mountain-ringed basin where the air is thin and the history runs deep. It is the political, financial, and cultural heart of Mexico, the largest city in North America, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited capitals in the hemisphere. Beneath its colonial plazas and glass towers lie the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the island city the Spanish razed five centuries ago.
The city sprawls across the Valley of Mexico, a high plateau at roughly 2,240 meters surrounded by volcanic peaks, including the snow-capped Popocatépetl, which still smolders to the southeast. The Aztecs built Tenochtitlan on islands in shallow Lake Texcoco, and the Spanish drained the lake over centuries to make room for the growing city. That drained lakebed is the city's curse: the soft clay subsides as groundwater is pumped out, so churches tilt and pavements buckle, and the basin amplifies earthquakes catastrophically, as in 1985 and 2017. The altitude and the surrounding mountains also trap air pollution in a basin with little natural ventilation.
The Mexica founded Tenochtitlan around 1325, and by the time Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519 it was one of the largest cities on Earth. The Spanish destroyed it in 1521 and rebuilt their colonial capital on the rubble, laying out the great Zócalo over the sacred precinct. For three centuries it governed New Spain, and after independence it became the capital of the Mexican republic. Today it is a sprawling, layered metropolis where Aztec ruins, baroque cathedrals, muralist masterpieces, and a thriving contemporary art and food scene coexist, the unrivaled center of Mexican life.