25A painting in Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antro-
pología by Luis Covarrubias imaginatively captures the
relationships between the pre-Hispanic city of Tenoch-
titlan and its surrounding environment (figure 2.1). Seen
from a bird’s-eye view from the west, the island city domi-
nates the surrounding lake, anchored to its shores by the
thin filaments of the causeways. At the city’s center are the
imposing buildings of the sacred precinct, with temples
rising from spacious plazas; a secondary center of Tlate-
lolco is visible at left, on the northern part of the island.
Around the lake are spent volcanic cones, and beyond them
the great mountains of the Valley of Mexico dominate the
eastern horizon line, their snowcapped peaks jutting into
the sky. This ring of mountains, whose jagged profiles can
be seen on particularly clear days in today’s city, was well
known from a distance to city residents, many of the peaks
known by their Nahuatl names: Cuauhtepec, Popocate-
petl, Iztaccihuatl. They were seen not only on the horizon
but also at the heart of the city, since the massive, rubble-
filled temples that rose up in every city center across the
valley and beyond were conceived of as smaller versions of
the surrounding mountains: the great pyramid of the citychaPTeR 2 Water and the Sacred City
figuRe 2.1. Luis Covarrubias (Mexico, 1919–1987), View of the
Valley of Mexico, ca. 1955. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico
City. Archivo Digitalización de las Colecciones Arqueológicas del Museo
Nacional de Antropología. cOnacULTa-inaH-canOn. Reproduction
authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.