New Spain: The Colonial Capital That Kept Flooding

On September 21, 1629, colonial officials released the engineer Enrico Martínez from prison and handed him back the one job he’d spent twenty years failing to finish: keeping Mexico City from flooding. The viceroy had locked him up days earlier on suspicion of sabotage. By the next morning, the decision to let him out again wouldn’t matter. Rain fell for forty hours straight, and Mexico City went underwater for five years.

The engineer they blamed

Martínez, a German-born surveyor and printer, had been appointed in 1607 to build the Desagüe, a drainage tunnel meant to carry floodwater out of the Valley of Mexico’s lake basin through a cut at Nochistongo, north of the city. The project was underfunded from the start, and after two decades it still wasn’t finished. When the San Mateo flood hit that September, the incomplete tunnel collapsed and made things worse, not better. The viceroy, Rodrigo Pacheco y Osorio, accused Martínez of deliberately closing the tunnel’s mouth and had him arrested; Martínez said the real problem was that he’d never been given enough money to shore up the tunnel’s roof. He was right, and it didn’t matter — the city flooded regardless, in places more than two meters deep. In the unsanitary years that followed, roughly 30,000 people died of disease and scarcity. Martínez died in 1632, the Desagüe still unfinished.

A capital built on somebody else’s grid

The flood happened because of a decision made a century earlier, when Cortés ordered the ruined Tenochtitlan rebuilt as a Spanish city rather than abandoned for higher ground. In 1522, the surveyor Alonso García Bravo laid out a new street grid over the old one, reusing the Mexica causeways but reorienting the central plaza. The result kept the capital exactly where the Mexica had put it: in the middle of a lake basin that flooded periodically no matter who was in charge of it.

None of that stopped New Spain from becoming the wealthiest colony in the Spanish empire. Silver mined in Zacatecas and Guanajuato passed through the capital on its way to the ports and on to Spain, and the money built a city to match: a university chartered in 1551, one of the first in the Americas, and a printing press that had already been running since 1539, the first in the hemisphere. Construction began on the Metropolitan Cathedral in 1573, a project so large it wouldn’t be finished for almost 240 years — outlasting the flood, the Desagüe, and Martínez himself many times over.

Still marking the water line

Mexico City never fully solved its flooding problem. Standing next to the cathedral today is the Monument to Enrico Martínez, a stone marker installed between 1877 and 1881 that records the historical water levels of the lakes that used to surround the city: Xochimilco, Zumpango, San Cristóbal, Xaltocan. The lakes themselves are almost entirely gone now, drained over the following century, but the ground they used to sit on is still settling. The city has sunk more than 30 feet over the last sixty years as it draws water from the aquifer beneath it. Three centuries after Martínez died trying to keep this city dry, it’s still fighting the same lake.

Sources: Enrico Martínez’s own Reportorio de los tiempos y historia natural desta Nueva España (1606); colonial-era administrative records of the Desagüe de Huehuetoca; American Scientist’s historical coverage of Mexico City’s lake-drainage engineering.