Xochimilco

Xochimilco lies beside the southern lakes of the Basin of Mexico. Its name, “place of the flower fields”, recalls a landscape of gardens and waterways. Farmers built chinampas, long cultivated plots raised in shallow water and separated by canals. These productive gardens supplied food and flowers, while canoes carried their produce through the waterways of the basin.

The Xochimilca settled around the lake before the Spanish conquest, extending their communities toward Tláhuac and the southern uplands. By the time the Spaniards arrived, chinampa cultivation had spread extensively across the lake. The conquest transformed the political order of the valley, but the canals and cultivated plots remained a distinctive feature of Xochimilco’s landscape. Their ordered strips of earth and water show how generations of farmers adapted the lake to intensive cultivation.