The last surviving canals and floating gardens of the Aztec lake system, worked since before the conquest and now full of painted boats.
Before the Spanish drained it, the Valley of Mexico held a chain of lakes, and the Aztecs farmed them using chinampas — rectangular plots built up from lake mud and vegetation, anchored by willow trees, separated by canals.
They are among the most productive agricultural systems ever devised, capable of several harvests a year.
Xochimilco is the last substantial surviving fragment: around 180 kilometres of canals and a working chinampa landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 alongside the historic centre.
The trajineras
Flat-bottomed punted boats, painted in bright colours and each named — usually a woman’s name — with an arch over the bow.
You hire the whole boat by the hour, not a seat. Rates are officially set and posted at the embarcaderos. A boat takes up to about twenty people.
The boatman poles you along the canals. Other boats come alongside selling food, drink, flowers and blankets, and mariachi and marimba bands will play for a fee per song, negotiated before they start.
On a Saturday or Sunday afternoon this is an enormous, loud, cheerful and extremely Mexican party on water. On a weekday morning it is quiet, green and almost silent.
Both are worth doing and they are entirely different experiences.
Which embarcadero
There are around nine. Nativitas and Fernando Celada are the busiest and most touristed. Cuemanco and Belem de las Flores are quieter and closer to the working chinampas and the ecological reserve.
If you want the party, go to Nativitas on a Sunday. If you want the landscape, go to Cuemanco on a Tuesday.
The chinampas
Still farmed. Around 20,000 people work them, growing vegetables and — increasingly — flowers, which is where the name comes from: Xochimilco means “in the flower field”.
The system is under real pressure from urbanisation, water extraction, subsidence and pollution. Several projects run tours of working chinampas with the farmers, which is a considerably better use of a morning than the party boats and puts money where it is needed.
The canals are also the last habitat of the axolotl, the neotenic salamander, which is critically endangered in the wild. There is an axolotl sanctuary and research station at Cuemanco.
The Island of the Dolls
La Isla de las Muñecas, a chinampa hung with hundreds of decaying dolls by a man named Julián Santana Barrera, who is said to have found a drowned girl and hung them in her memory until his own death in 2001.
It is genuinely unsettling and it is a two-hour round trip by boat from the main embarcaderos, so it needs arranging and costs accordingly. A nearer replica island exists and is not the same thing.
Practicalities
Metro Line 2 to Tasqueña, then the Tren Ligero to Xochimilco — about an hour and a half from the centre in total.
Take cash. Bring sun cover; the boats have roofs but the sides are open.
Toilets on the boats do not exist. Use them before boarding.
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