Once upon a time

Once upon a time in the high hills there was a group of nomad people who were looking for a new home. They had been given a quest, the quest would lead them to a new home. Their great spiritual lord had given them the task to find a new homeland for their people.

The great leader had said to them you must go out and find a new home (it is unclear what they had done to be kicked out in the first place, but anyway... I digress). The leader told them they would know that they had found the new home when they saw an Eagle eating a snake while perched on a rock with a cactus coming out of it ( I think thats like telling an aprentice to get a can of striped paint, again I digress though).

So off they went for many many years they wandered the lands looking for this mysterious occourence. One day they came across a lake. It was a magnificent lake, in a natural basin with no way for the water to escape, replenisehd all the time by the magnificent snow fields all around. They were thirsty and needed a place to rest so they camped.

From their campsite they saw a very small island in the towards one side of the vast lake. They set out to the island to find food. When the got there, to their amazement, there was a huge Eagle perched on a rock with a cactus coming out of it. In its mouth was a Snake. They had found their home.

Over the next 100 years they set out building floating gardens to grow their food and build bridges to the coast to make transport easier. As their numbers grew, so did the need for food so more gardens were planted and they pumped some of the water out to make more land (some of the earliest land reclamation on the planet). They realsied that they would need to make a drianage system as most of this reclaimed land was below the natural water level. So they built an intricate system of weirs and drains and dams that also allowed them to purify the slightly brackish water.

They were producing so much food that they became very wealthy and took over the whole lake valley. More and more poeple moved in and they needed to reclaim more land, and so the process went.

These people were the Aztecs. Their island home grew into a huge city that is home to 22 million people, built on entirely reclaimed land, with the Worlds most intricate drianage system some of which are 6m wide, and where today there is NO trace of the huge 50km lake that used to be called Lake Texcoco.

every day you can still see the Eagle on the rock with a cactus coming out it, and still with the snake in its mouth. It is on every piece of currency in the city, it is on the flag as well. The Eagle is a symbol of Strength, The rock is the nature, the cactus is food, and the snake is virility. This is one of the most incredible citities I have ever visited.

Its called Mexico CITY.