Who Was Alexander Humboldt?

 At the far end of the Alameda Park in downtown Mexico City is a small monument which I had not noticed before.  It is a statue of Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859).

You may or may not know who Alexander Humboldt was, but he was a celebrated German geographer, naturalist and explorer of the late 18th century and early 19th centuries.  He led an expedition to the Americas between 1799 and 1804, and he was the first non-Spanish European to describe the region from a scientific point of view.  He took meticulous notes of everything he saw, and published numerous scientific volumes which laid the foundation for physical geography and the interrelation between the physical sciences... biology, meteorology and geology.  Other books based on his travel diaries became "bestsellers", and he was one of the most famous men in Europe.

During the course of his Latin American travels he spent a year in Mexico (then the Spanish colony of New Spain).  He arrived at the port of Acapulco and traveled by mule train over the mountains to Mexico City where he was welcomed by the Spanish viceroy.  Humboldt was greatly impressed by Mexico City, the largest in the Americas at that time.  It was he who supposedly gave it the nickname of "The City of Palaces", and he wrote that "no city of the new continent, without even exempting those of the United States, can display such great and solid scientific establishments as the capital of Mexico."

The topic of Humboldt's personal life remains controversial.  He never married, and he had a number of strong male friendships including companions on his travels.  Since Humboldt destroyed all his personal letters, we will never know for certain if those friendships were of a romantic nature.  I recently read the historical novel "México" by Pedro Angel Palou. Humboldt makes an appearance in the story and has an affair with one of the male characters!