For over fifty years Juan Cortez has been walking the paths of the Helia Bravo Hollis botanic garden. From the entrance to the top of the hill and the viewing platform.  He knows more than anyone, the regional plant’s properties, its animal’s behaviours, the geography of its mountains and the history of his ancestors, that lived for generations in the same place. He survived one of those, so mexican, earthquakes perched at the top of the viewing platform.   He knows which pla

Located in Mexico’s Central Valley, between the years 200 bc and 650ac, Teotihuacán was a huge religious centre, perhaps the most important in Mesoamerican history. It’s name comes from the náhuatl Word which means “Place of the Gods”. The two principal centres are the one dedicated to the Moon and the one dedicated to the Sun.  In the Avenue of the Dead there are a number of building from where the elites saw the religious ceremonies.   A distinctive Teotihuacán art forms we

It was built on top of Tenochtitlán, the city of the Mexica, the water-city. Reclaimed from the lake and sprinkled with the blood of animal and human sacrifices.   Destroyed and rebuilt for centuries, by conquest, war and revolutions, shaped by religious and political leaders, workers and builders.   Its architects, like the ancient ones, keep on building monuments for its gods, functional, huge and beautiful. We are impressed  and seduced by their size, we are reminded how s

In his “Incomplete history of Mexico”, Eduardo Galeano tells us that the Mexica funded the city on a hill overlooking a huge lake, when one of their chiefs saw an eagle sitting on a nopal eating a serpent.  As the city grew it was connected by canals and thousands of canoes transporting materials, food and traded goods.   For hundreds of years the inhabitants reclaimed land from the lake until it disappeared, becoming fields, roads, houses and neighborhoods. Today the Mexico