Cortez diary entry. source 21

"This great city of Tenochtitlán is built on the salt lake, and no matter by what road you travel there are two leagues from the main body of the city to the mainland. There are four artificial causeways leading to it, and each is as wide as two cavalry lances. The city itself is as big as Seville or Córdoba. The main streets are very wide and very straight; some of these are on the land, but the rest and all the smaller ones are half on land, half canals where they paddle their canoes. All the streets have openings in places so that the water may pass from one canal to another. Over all these openings, and some of them are very wide, there are bridges. . . . There are, in all districts of this great city, many temples or houses for their idols. They are all very beautiful buildings. . . . Amongst these temples there is one, the principal one, whose great size and magnificence no human tongue could describe, for it is so large that within the precincts, which are surrounded by very high wall, a town of some five hundred inhabitants could easily be built. All round inside this wall there are very elegant quarters with very large rooms and corridors where their priests live. There are as many as forty towers, all of which are so high that in the case of the largest there are fifty steps leading up to the main part of it and the most important of these towers is higher than that of the cathedral of Seville. . . ."

Extract from the personal diary of Hernan Cortez.

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Tenochtitlan - general Information

At the time of the Spanish conquest in 1521, the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan was among the largest cities in the world, with perhaps as many as 200,000 inhabitants. In less than 200 years, it evolved from a small settlement on an island in the western swamps of Lake Texcoco into the powerful political, economic, and religious center of the greatest empire of Precolumbian Mexico. Tenochtitlan was a city of great wealth, obtained through the spoils of tribute from conquered regions. Of astounding beauty and impressive scale, its towering pyramids were painted in bright red and blue, and its palaces in dazzling white. Colorful, busy markets with a bewildering array of foods and luxuries impressed native visitors and conquering Spaniards alike.

Most of the construction in Tenochtitlan took place during the reigns of four Aztec kings beginning in the 1470s. Built largely upon land reclaimed from Lake Texcoco, the city was laid out on a grid, inspired by the still visible ruins of the ancient city of Teotihuacan of a thousand years earlier. Its network of streets and canals teemed with canoes that transported people and goods within the city and across the lake to towns on the shore, to which it was linked by three raised causeways. Two aqueducts supplied fresh water. At the heart of Tenochtitlan was the Sacred Precinct, the religious and ceremonial center not just of the city, but of the empire as well. Surrounded by a masonry wall of serpents, this enclave of about 380 by 330 metres could hold more than 8,000 people within its precincts. The temples of the most important Aztec gods were here. There was also a ballcourt, priests' quarters, and schools for training young noblemen for the priesthood. Adjacent to the Sacred Precinct, sumptuous palaces of the kings and nobles included beautiful gardens, aviaries, and zoos. Administration buildings were there as well. Commoners lived at a distance and were organized into neighborhoods, called calpulli, with their own local temples and markets. Those populations included laborers and farmers as well as craft specialists such as potters, weavers, sculptors, lapidaries, featherworkers, and soldiers.

On a fateful day in August 1521, life in this magnificent urban centre changed forever. Shortly after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the Spaniards razed the already devastated city and built the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain on its ruins. They named the new metropolis Mexico City, which today, again, is one of the most populous cities in the world.

Tenochtitlan. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/teno_1/hd_teno_1.htm