Timeline of Mexico City

Teotihuacán rises. Forty kilometres north-east, a city of over 100,000 people is built on a grid two and a half kilometres long. It collapses around 650 AD and is ruins long before the Mexica arrive.

The eagle on the cactus. The Mexica settle an island in Lake Texcoco, where tradition says they saw the sign they had been promised. The image is now on the flag.

The Triple Alliance. Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan form the alliance that becomes the Aztec empire, extending tribute across central Mexico.

Nezahualcóyotl’s dyke. A ten-mile earthwork separates the brackish eastern lake from the fresh western one, controlling flooding and salinity. Its neglect after the conquest is why the city floods for centuries.

The Templo Mayor is rededicated. The sixth rebuilding of the great temple is consecrated with mass sacrifice, in numbers the sources give variously and historians dispute.

Cortés enters the city. Moctezuma II receives the Spanish on the Iztapalapa causeway. Bernal Díaz writes that some of the soldiers asked whether what they saw was a dream.

Smallpox, and the Noche Triste. Disease reaches the city and kills a large share of the population including the emperor Cuitláhuac. In June the Spanish are driven out across the causeways with heavy losses.

Tenochtitlan falls. After a three-month siege, Cuauhtémoc is captured at Tlatelolco. Cortés orders the city demolished and a Spanish capital built on the same ground with the same stone.

The first Franciscans. Twelve friars arrive and begin the conversion, building churches on temple platforms across the valley.

The Virgin of Guadalupe. Juan Diego’s vision at Tepeyac, on a hill previously associated with the goddess Tonantzin. She becomes the emblem of Mexican identity.

The Viceroyalty of New Spain. Mexico City becomes the capital of a territory reaching from California to Central America and across the Pacific to Manila.

The university. The Real y Pontificia Universidad de México is founded, the first university in North America.

The cathedral is begun. It takes 240 years to finish, which is why it runs through Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical in one building.

The draining begins. Work starts on the Nochistongo cut to drain the lake. The project continues in one form or another for over four hundred years.

The great flood. Water stands in the city for five years, killing thousands. Abandoning the site and rebuilding elsewhere is seriously considered.

The corn riot. A harvest failure and grain shortage bring a crowd that burns the viceroy’s palace and the city hall on the Zócalo.

El Grito de Dolores. Father Miguel Hidalgo calls for rebellion from his parish church. The date is Mexico’s Independence Day and the bell now hangs at the National Palace.

Independence. After eleven years of war, the Army of the Three Guarantees enters Mexico City and Spanish rule ends.

Chapultepec falls. United States forces storm the castle and occupy the city. Mexico loses half its territory in the treaty that follows. The Niños Héroes are commemorated at the foot of the hill.

Maximilian arrives. The Austrian archduke is installed as emperor by the French, lives at Chapultepec, and lays out the Paseo de la Reforma. He is shot in 1867.

Porfirio Díaz takes power. Thirty-five years of dictatorship bring railways, drainage, electricity and Bellas Artes, and a concentration of land that produces the Revolution.

The Gran Canal opens. The drainage works are completed, and Lake Texcoco is effectively gone. The city begins sinking in earnest.

The Revolution begins. A decade of war costs around a million lives. Zapata and Villa enter Mexico City in 1914 and are photographed in the presidential chair.

The Constitution. Signed at Querétaro, providing for land reform, labour rights and secular education, and still in force.

Rivera begins the National Palace murals. The staircase takes six years and becomes the definitive visual account of Mexican history.

Bellas Artes is completed. Begun in 1904 in Art Nouveau and finished thirty years later in Art Deco, having sunk four metres in the process.

Trotsky is assassinated. Ramón Mercader kills him with an ice axe at his house in Coyoacán, after an earlier attempt led by the painter Siqueiros.

Ciudad Universitaria. The UNAM campus opens, a masterwork of Mexican modernism and later a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Torre Latinoamericana. A skyscraper is completed on soft lake clay in an earthquake zone. It survives 1957 and 1985 without structural damage.

Tlatelolco. Ten days before the Olympics open, the army and a paramilitary unit fire on a student demonstration at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. The death toll has never been established.

The Templo Mayor is found. Electricity workers strike the Coyolxauhqui stone at the corner of the Zócalo, and the Aztec great temple is excavated over the following four years.

The earthquake. A magnitude 8.0 quake off the Pacific coast destroys much of the city. Several thousand die — the true figure is disputed — and the government’s failure to respond is met by neighbours organising their own rescue.

The city elects its own mayor. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas becomes the first elected head of government of the Federal District, ending direct presidential appointment.

The PRI loses. Seventy-one years of continuous rule by one party ends at the national election.

CDMX. The Federal District becomes Mexico City, a full federal entity with its own constitution.

The second earthquake. A magnitude 7.1 quake strikes thirty-two years to the day after 1985, and hours after the annual commemorative drill. Around 370 people die.

The water crisis. The Cutzamala reservoirs fall to historic lows and Mexico City discusses a Day Zero. A city built on a lake now imports its water over a thousand metres of lift.