What is now Mexico City used to be Tenochtitlan. An artist made a rendering of what Tenochtitlan might have looked like before the Spanish arrived. The entire place was a lake, and the city was built in the middle of the lake. It contained canals everywhere, and had causeways connecting the edges of the lake to the city.

I wonder if Mexico City has been effectively slowly “mining” that lake for centuries. I suppose the lake will be fed by precipitation, because the city is in a bowl so any rain that falls there will be collected, but does the amount of rain come anywhere close to matching what they’re using?

As an aside, to me it’s tragic that the main temple of the Aztecs was razed and a Catholic church was plopped down on top of it. Just as tragic is that the Spanish indoctrination process was so successful that only 0.3% of the country has a non-Christian religion. As a result, most Mexicans see the church the Spanish had built not as a grotesque symbol of the destruction of the original city, but as a good and holy place.