Mexico City's floating gardens threatened by urbanisation
Mexico City's floating gardens threatened by urbanisation
Farmers' fields that once fed the Aztecs face the end of the line
Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 February 2012 16.08 EST
Herons swoop over a flat-bottomed boat navigating a canal and rest in one of the water-loving ahuehuete trees on the embankment. In a nearby field, an ageing farmer with a straw hat and chiselled features checks his cabbages while two younger men weed a field of lettuces. Another man skilfully manoeuvres a wheelbarrow across a narrower canal and disappears past a bush of the white, trumpet-shaped alcatraz lilies that Diego Rivera was so fond of painting.
Welcome to San Gregorio Atlapulco – a bucolic paradise in the middle of the watery corridor along the south-eastern edge of the Mexican capital and one of the last true redoubts of the floating gardens, known as chinampas, that once sustained the great Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. But even here, where the madding crowd is still relatively far away, there is a palpable sense that the clock is ticking for this way of life.
"When I was a child, all the chinampas were cultivated all of the time. Now it is probably down to about a third," says Mario Medina, a 60-year-old chinampero who says his land has been in his family since time immemorial, but none of his five children have any intention of farming it. "I'm lucky if I get them to help for an hour. They are city people now."
These flat and fertile gardens, built from piles of mud anchored by the ahuehuetes, were producing multiple yearly harvests of crops such as tomatoes and courgettes long before the Aztecs arrived in the lake-filled valley in the 14th century. The chinampas boomed as the Aztec empire and its capital – also built on an artificial island – flourished. Their slow decline began once the Spanish conquest brought a new urban ethos that sought to dominate the wet environment, rather than working in harmony with it. But the real danger of annihilation only emerged hundreds of years later when Mexico City's population exploded.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/28/mexico-city-floating-gardens-urbanisation?CMP=twt_fd
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