To feed their enormous population, the Aztecs ingeniously built chinampas, or floating gardens, to convert the marshy wetlands of Lake Texcoco into arable farmland. These floating gardens were a masterpiece of engineering.
Each garden was 300 feet long by 30 feet wide. To make a garden, workers weaved sticks together to form a giant raft, and then then piled mud from the bottom of the lake on top of the raft to create a layer of soil three feet thick.
The floating gardens were companion planted with corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, peppers, and flowers, and these incredible gardens yielded seven crops per year…
Tens of thousands of heads rolled down the stone steps of those pyramids, and the rivers that turned the temples red in the noonday sun were a plea to the gods to keep the gardens growing. But in the end, when the sky went dark over Tenochtitlan, and the earth shook beneath the feet of Montezuma, it was not the sun god who brought judgment; it was the Conquistadors.
The Spaniards’ military advantages over the Aztecs—the swords, guns, and horses–were nullified in the sanctuary of the floating gardens, and Cortez was covetous of gold, not Indian corn, so he ordered the destruction of the chinampas…