So yesterday was just a day of travel as we attempt to get ourselves to Oaxaca (wa-ha-ka). We succeeded and are now we are about to start our first day. But I’m here to chat about not yesterday but the day before. Having such a great time at the luche libre “tour” we decided to sign up for another tour that the hostel ran (or rather that they hooked up with). We took the Teotihuacan tour which was led by a lovely man called George.
According to George he was a University lecturer in Mexico City and did that most of the time and tour guided some of the time. He was an opened minded man and you could tell that by the way he spoke. I’m a bit of a history lover so I adored the tour and I adored his enthusiasm for history, and for correcting our beliefs about history and Mexican culture. If you’re not a history nerd you might want to give this post a miss.
There were a few stops on the tour. The first place he brought us to was a small ruin in the middle of the city. He brought us there as it was the meeting place of time and culture. In front of us lay the ruins of a prominent Aztec marketplace, beyond that was a Spanish built church, and all around us sat high rise homes of modern day Mexican citizens. The history of it, in his very condensed and simplified version, went something like this.
A long time ago the Spanish arrived in South America. They came into South America and told the native people living there that they had one choice. One choice that they had to make then and there. It was the only condition of their continued survival. If they said no, the Spanish would kill them all. The condition was that because their gods were a blight on the Spaniards God they had to renounce their faith and start worshipping the Spaniards one true God. This, according to our friend George, is what really started to set South American countries/cultures up as we know them today. In Mexico they decided to accept the rule of the Spaniards and gave up their gods. This resulted in Mexico have an incredibly large native population, even today. And why in some other South American countries the native population is not so large and people look so different.
I don’t want to try and write down the exact statistics he gave up because I can’t really remember them very well. But it was around 70% – 80% native blood is still prevalent in Mexico today. Mexico is also, apparently, the third most culturally diverse nation in the world, under India, and China. George portrayed it as a blessing that so much native blood from way back when had survived till today. But he didn’t gloss over how terrible it would’ve been to have to give up their faith and convert to Catholicism.
Now what is really interesting was that the Spanish, in order to enforce this new rule of law, told the natives at the time to tear down their temples, shrines, and marketplaces, and with those stones build the new churches, cathedrals, and places of worship. Where we stood, in the meeting place of all three times and cultures, was previously a bustling and alive marketplace for the Aztecs. They’d built the church that stood there with the stones from this place. Which goes to show how impressive their building must’ve been as there weren’t a small amount of ruins left. This is also why a lot of big places of worship in Mexico today, the Basilica of Our Lady Guadalupe, the Metropolitan Cathedral, all sit next to ancient Aztec ruins.
That was our brief and very condensed version of a small part of the Spanish invasion and what has made Mexico City, Mexico City. After that we were off to Teotihuacan. Now Teotihuacan is a really interesting place. It was at one point an ancient city. There are two temples there, the Temple of the Sun, and the Temple of the Moon. The Temple of the Sun is apparently the third tallest pyramid in the world. The first was in Egypt, and the second in Peru. What is interesting though is that no one knows who built the city. It wasn’t the Aztecs, who found it and named it Teotihuacan, meaning City of the Gods, or Birthplace of the Gods. Whatever the place was originally called is apparently completely lost in time. People just built this giant city, which was apparently the sixth largest city in the world at the time. And then later they abandoned it.
There are apparently many theories as to why this mysterious civilisation abandoned the city. George’s theory and apparently the anthropological community at large theory was that the people destroyed the land around it making it unliveable. This theory came about from years of study (in a team George was apparently a part of) from anthropologists and geologists alike. In a nutshell what they think happened is this; all these ruins we see today used to be very brightly painted. All the Aztecs ruins used to have a huge amount of colour on them and there’s evidence that whoever built Teotihuacan did the same. This paint was painted onto the rocks after they’d been treated with some kind of paste. The paste, I can’t remember if it was to heat it up, or to put in it, but it required a lot of trees. The land around Teotihuacan was very dry and arid, from what I could tell but apparently it used to be more like a rainforest. So they think the people cut down too many trees, the land couldn’t replenish itself, and over the years it eventually eroded away and the land became uninhabitable forcing the mysterious civilisation to abandon the city.
The Temple of the Sun, they think, was only used for ceremonial purposes because unlike Egyptian temples which have rooms inside the Temple of the Sun is solid. There is one underground tunnel that they assume is sacred (as they built a temple on top of it) but they don’t know what it was used for. The Temple of the Moon is a burial place, presumable from those sacrificed to the Gods.
The Temple of the Sun we could walk up the steps. It’s 71.17 meters tall (according to Wikipedia) and has a lot of steps. I know this because Callum decided he had to get to the top. So we both trekked it up there (with me maybe taking a few small breaks along the way for breathers and photography stops). The Temple of the Moon you could only get partway up, but was still too many steps. The Temple of the Sun is much taller but the two temples looked about the same height because the Temples were built on an incline. The whole thing was fascinating and the temples were amazing. Teotihuacan is a fascinating place and I’m so glad we got to visit it.
It was a long hot day out ending in lunch and visiting the Basilica of Our Lady Guadalupe where we spent most of the time petting stray dogs who were all thankfully friendly. Then we got back to the hostel collapsed when we should’ve packed, watched some Lord of the Rings, we’re on to the Two Towers, and fell asleep.
It’s sad leaving Mexico City behind, there’s so much that I still want to do and see. But it’s time for the next segment of the adventure.
Over and out
Rachel
Travel Bee 