The avenues are the rivers. For nearly five hundred years Mexico City fought its own rivers, and it won: one by one they were straightened, culverted and buried under asphalt. What survives of them is the street names. Río Churubusco, Viaducto Río de la Piedad, Río Consulado, Río Mixcoac — every one of those traffic arteries is a watercourse with a road on top.
What was here. By 1929 the rivers feeding the basin were De los Remedios, Consulado, Tlalnepantla, De la Piedad and Churubusco, controlled by the Dolores and Tecamachalco dams. The lakes of Xochimilco and Texcoco were drying year by year, and the Tajo de Nochistongo — the colonial cut that drains the basin towards the Gulf — kept the floods in check.
How they disappeared. The Consulado was culverted in 1942 after its condition became a public health problem. Works channelled the Mixcoac, Becerra and Tacubaya into the Río Hondo. In 1950 the Viaducto Miguel Alemán opened on top of the Río de la Piedad along its whole length — the city's first urban motorway, built directly in the riverbed. Between 1952 and 1960 a sixteen-kilometre interceptor was driven across the west of the city, from the Río Magdalena to the Remedios; from 1952 the Churubusco was diverted so that it no longer fed the lakes of Xochimilco, Mixquic and Tláhuac; and by 1960 the Mixcoac had been piped for a kilometre and a half.
The map of the 1860s. Morales, Tacubaya, De la Piedad, De los Remedios, Consulado, Tlalnepantla, Churubusco, Mixcoac, Becerra, the La Viga, Chalco and Nacional canals, the San Lázaro canal, Magdalena, San Juan de Dios, San Ángel, San Joaquín, San Buenaventura and Guadalupe.
Where you can still see water. The Río Magdalena, in Los Dinamos, is the last river in the city still running in the open. The canals of Xochimilco are what is left of the lake. And the Canal Nacional, in the south-east, has been partly recovered as a linear park — the one place where the city has put a waterway back.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
