The Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City took 240 years to build. That’s not a typo. Two centuries and forty years, from 1573 to 1813, with dozens of architects, viceroys, archbishops, earthquakes, floods, and even a fire along the way. And it all began because Hernán Cortés needed to wipe the Aztec gods off the map with something more powerful than a sword: a building. He laid the first stone of a minor church in 1524 right at the crossroads of the causeways leading to the spiritual center of Tenochtitlán, and he literally built it with stones from the temple of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. That church became too small within a century, so in 1571 the first stone of the current cathedral was laid, atop what were probably the temples of Quetzalcoatl or Xitle, while the old cathedral continued to function alongside it until 1625. The fundamental problem, and the pun is intended, is that building a cathedral of that size on a lakebed was, architecturally speaking, madness. The ground was muddy and unstable from day one, so the engineers drove thousands of wooden pilings into the mud and chose tezontle and chiluca stone instead of quarry stone because they were lighter. The original design called for seven naves, like the Seville Cathedral, but the terrain forced them to reduce it to five. That’s why the cathedral is tilted: at the same rate as the 20th century, it has sunk more than ten meters into the former Lake Texcoco. In 1790, while renovating the Plaza Mayor, the Sun Stone was discovered buried and placed in the side wall of the cathedral because they didn’t know where else to put it. In 1967, a fire destroyed the choir, two organs, and priceless paintings. Several of the architects who designed it died before seeing their part of the building completed. The last major section was finished by Manuel Tolsá in 1813, just as Mexico was in the midst of its War of Independence. The largest cathedral in Latin America was built on top of the ruins of the most important religious center of the pre-Hispanic world, using its own stones, on a lakebed, over a period of 240 years. Every time you see it leaning in the Zócalo, remember that it’s not broken. It’s sinking, just as it always has.
Source: donporfiriodiaz
