The Ruins Below

Mexico City is built upon the remains of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.  When the Spanish conquerors arrived, they tore down the Aztec city building by building and used the stones to build their own city.  Yet the foundations of the palaces and temples of Tenochtitlán as well as enormous quantities of artifacts are still beneath the streets and buildings of Mexico City today.  Every time archaeologists dig beneath the surface they find a treasure trove to be uncovered.

Archaeology in the center of Mexico City began in earnest in 1978 when electric workers digging beneath a street near the Metropolitan Cathedral came upon an Aztec monolith.  Archaeologists were called in, excavations continued, thirteen buildings were torn down, and the base of the main Aztec temple was uncovered.

Today, the remains of the "Templo Mayor" are here in the heart of Mexico City.  A museum was built to house the thousands of artifacts that were discovered .

In 1991, the "Programa de Arqueología Urbana" (Program of Urban Archaeology) began to make further investigations into what is beneath the historic center of Mexico City.

Along Guatemala Street a series of posters along the fence behind the Cathedral tells of the discoveries made by this program.  (I have already written about a couple of these finds.)

At #16 Guatemala Street a new building was going to be constructed. (I hope they were planning on preserving the façade of the old building!)  

The construction work revealed that beneath the building were the remains of the Aztec ballcourt, and a temple to Ehécatl, the god of the wind.

Right next door in a colonial mansion is the Spanish Cultural Center operated by the government of Spain.  When an extension on the rear of the building was built, the foundation of the "calmécac", the school for Aztec nobles was discovered.

Those ruins, in a subterranean level of the Cultural Center, are open to the public.  I visited the "calmécac" in 2019 and wrote about it HERE.   

Just a couple doors down the street is another old building (for some reason it is covered with fabric with an image of the façade) where the remains of the "tzompantli"... the skull rack were found.  

On my last trip to Mexico I wrote about that discovery in some detail HERE.

Finally, around the corner and facing the archaeological site of the Aztec main temple is an 18th century neo-classical palace.  

In 2018 archaeologists found beneath the palace an Aztec staircase which probably led to a temple.

That excavation is supposedly open to the public, but when I was there the palace was temporarily closed.  Hopefully on a future trip I will have a chance to see it.

There is no doubt that many more discoveries will be made by archaeologists in the future.