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Mexico: In Mexico City, the pandemic revived Aztec-era island farms

See how the city’s residents sought out chinampas, human-built islands that once fed several hundred thousand people, for sustenance and solace during COVID-19.

By Alejandra Borunda
National Geographic
2 Jul 2022

Excerpt:

In Mexico City’s massive Central de Abastos market, the largest produce market in the world, you can walk for 10 minutes along a half-mile-long corridor filled only with bananas. Down another of the market’s eight hallways, millions of onions balance precariously; down a third, lettuces are stacked taller than their sellers. Enough produce flows through these halls to feed some 30 percent of the 22 million residents of this capital city. It’s a showcase for modern agricultural supply chains.

Just a few miles south in the Xochimilco neighbourhood is a totally different kind of produce mecca—one more than a thousand years old. Here, in a wetland cut through with spidery canals and packed with wildlife, farmers like Miguel de Valle still farm by hand on the chinampas, artificial islands first built by the predecessors of the Aztecs from the mud of what was then a vast shallow lake.

Before the Spanish Conquest, the super-productive chinampas formed the backbone of the Aztec city’s food supply. The soil was so rich and growing techniques so effective that they fed hundreds of thousands. But over centuries, and most noticeably in the last few decades, the encroaching metropolis and cultural shifts away from local food production sharply diminished them.

Two people punt their way to their chinampa early in the morning. Most chinamperos use flat-bottomed boats or canoes to go to and from their farms, since outboard motors are rarely allowed to be used in the canals.

Read the complete article here.