Walk through La Merced neighbourhood
Guide: Atea
July 7, 2017
Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire was founded in 1324 in the location where the aztec people found an upright eagle on a cactus devouring a snake. The location of the foundational myth occupied what we know today as the Merced neighbourhood, which through the addition of territories built on top of chinampas (long and narrow floating fields on a shallow lake bed, artificially built up), three more neighbourhoods would be incorporated, thus building the very splendid and large city that Cortez found at his arrival.
Our ramble starts from the Merced underground stop and it will snake through one of the oldest neighborhoods of Mexico City, known as Teopan –the place of the Gods– during the Mexica Empire, as San Pablo Teopan during the Colonial Age, and nowadays named Merced district.
ABOUT THE RAMBLE INTERLUDES. The Ramble Interludes cycle proposes a series of walks; each one will depart from a space that have a special connection with art and the city and will focus on a specific urban context, a certain neighborhood. Representatives of ten different spaces will guide subjective visits to the urban surroundings the building belongs to; they will point out spontaneous situations that have sparked their interest or anonymous architectural landmarks. This series of encounters thus sets out to investigate the relation between the architecture of the city and its users through case studies where different communities and collectives are connected with their districts thanks to cultural programmes.
