Mexico City

Date: October 24, 2024

While we were (yet again) in Mexico City we decided to visit the Teotihuacan ruins outside the city. The most practical way to do that was to join a guided tour that took care of transportation. The tour we chose also allowed us to visit a few other interesting places in the city. First we stopped on the side of a street to have a look at the few excavated remains of Tlatelolco. Tlatelolco was a pre-Columbian city-state founded in 1338, just thirteen years after the Aztecs founded their capital, Tenochtitlan, next to what is now the central plaza in the historic center of Mexico City. The main temple of Tlatelolco is the ruin seen in the right half of the picture below, right in front of the church building. It was recently discovered that embedded inside the main temple is a pyramid that is even older, so dating from before Tlatelolco was founded.

We moved quickly on to something completely different: The site where the Virgin Mary appeared four times to the indigenous peasant Juan Diego in December 1531 and which is now the most visited catholic site of pilgrimage in the world. Millions of pilgrims travel here each year in December to celebrate the anniversary: In 2009 more than 6 million pilgrims visited the churches that have been built at the site of the apparitions.

To help Juan Diego prove to the archbishop that he had indeed seen the Virgin Mary, she arranged some flowers in a cloak. When later Juan Diego opened the cloak before Archbishop Zumárraga, the flowers fell to the floor, and revealed on the cloak the image of the Virgin. The scene is illustrated in this sculpture:

The original cloak with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as this version of the virgin Mary is called, is enshrined in the latest of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe:

In front of the wall where the cloak hangs is a moving walkway, like in the airports, to make sure that people keep moving and don't linger in front of the image, allowing more people to see the miraculous cloak.

A number of churches and chapels have been built at and around the site of the apparitions. On top of the Tepeyac hill (over the modern building in the left middle ground) is the Capilla del Cerrito. A first chapel was built there in 1666 and around 1740 the current temple was constructed. The building on the right with the cupola is the Capilla del Pocito (the well chapel). It was built from 1777 to 1791 on a well of water considered miraculous.

The small chapel is in the Baroque style, and it is the only chapel with a circular base built during the 18th century that is still preserved in Mexico:

The area around the churches is not very stable and it seems that every time a new chapel or temple was added, the temples around it would be damaged. Here it seems like the Capilla del Pocito is sinking compared to the surroundings:

In the middle of the picture below is the Old Basilica of Guadalupe (leaning slightly to the left) which was inaugurated in 1709 and stayed the center of the Virgen of Guadalupe pilgrimage until the new basilica was built, a part of which is seen in the left part of the picture:

The new basilica was built to provide a safe space for the cloak with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and allow access to a greater number of pilgrims. Also the old basilica had become increasingly unstable, partly due to the building of a convent right next to it (seen in the right part of the picture above).

The new Basilica of Guadalupe was built in 1974-1976 and can fit 10,000 people for mass:

We then went on to Teotihuacan, which is situated about 40 km northeast of Mexico City.

Teotihuacan was not an Aztec city, and predates the Aztec Empire by many centuries, although the Aztecs claimed a common ancestry with the Teotihuacanos. They modified and incorporated aspects of the much older and largely unknown Teotihuacan culture into their own myths and Teotihuacan became a place of pilgrimage as a symbol of the place where the sun was created. The most famous monuments of the city of Teotihuacan are the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon.

The city is thought to have been established around 100 BC, with major monuments continuously under construction until about 250 AD. Many of the monuments were sacked and systematically burned around 550 AD, although the city may have lasted in an altered and weakened form until sometime between the 7th and 8th centuries AD.

Here is a view of the Pyramid of the Sun (in front) and the Pyramid of the Moon, as seen from the third pyramid of Teotihuacan; the Temple of the Feathered Serpent:

The Temple of the Feathered Serpent is a six-level step pyramid decorated at each level with (you guessed it!) feathered serpent heads alternating with those of another snake-like creature:

An interesting aspect about the Temple of Feathered Serpent is that it seems to have started out as the political power center of Teotihuacan but sometime between 250 and 350 AD, power shifted, maybe from a centralized, monarchical political system to a more decentralized and bureaucratic organization and the Temple was desecrated and burnt. After this, in 378, a group of Teotihuacanos that had been thrown out of the city during the Feathered-Serpent purge organized a coup d'etat in the Maya city of Tikal, in what is today Guatemala, 600 miles away from Teotihuacan, defeating and executing the native Tikal king. Later, in 426, the Tikal-based Teotihuacan influence was expanded to the cities of Copan and Quiriguá, both places that we have previously visited.

Back to Teotihuacan — here we are walking towards the Pyramid of the Sun. The two persons with backpacks in the foreground of the picture are our guide (to the left) and one of the other participants in our tour (with the orange backpack), the latter was an Indian guy with a YouTube channel showing him traveling the world and this guided visit to Teotihuacan was part of his three-week tour of Mexico.

Félicie standing in front of the Pyramid of the Sun:

In addition to the three pyramids Teotihuacan also has complex multi-family residential compounds and the 4 km long Avenue of the Dead that connects the three pyramids. Some of the structures have vibrant well-preserved murals, the one below showing a jaguar on a stripy background:

Here is a view along the Avenue of the Dead, looking from the Pyramid of the Sun towards the Temple of the Feathered Serpent:

Small pyramidal structures are flanking the Avenue of the Dead. The Aztecs believed they were tombs, hence the name of the avenue, but they have later been discovered to be ceremonial platforms topped with temples.

As the final part of the visit we went into one of the residential structures, that based on its size and wealth of carved stone and murals must have belonged to upper class Teotihuacanos. Here is a inner courtyard flanked by intricately carved pillars:

The well preserved lower part of a mural in one of the rooms: