Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral
Baroque cathedral raised on a drained lakebed, engineered back level after decades of sinking unevenly.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral opens with its twin bell towers on the Zócalo, tilting toward each other after centuries of sinking unevenly into the drained bed of Lake Texcoco. You'll hear how Spanish builders packed the soft clay beneath the foundation with thousands of wooden logs in the fifteen seventies, and how the sinking accelerated as the city drained its aquifer through the twentieth century. The guide follows the engineers who, by the nineteen nineties, tried a counterintuitive fix rather than simply propping the building back up.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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