The Floating Gardens

The Aztec confederation had achieved a high level of efficiency in the Valley of Mexico... ....The Aztecs' irrigation works and artificial islands dazzled Cortes —even though they were not made of gold. The Aztecs also responded in a remarkable way to nature's challenges. The surviving islands in the dried-up lake where Mexico City now rises on native ruins are known to tourists today as "floating gardens." The Aztecs created these because of the shortage of land in the place chosen for establishing Tenochtitlan. They moved large quantities of mud from the banks and shored up the new mud-islands between narrow walls of reeds until tree roots gave them firmness. Between these exceptionally fertile islands flowed the canals, and on them arose the great Aztec capital, with its broad avenues, its austerely beautiful palaces, and its stepped pyramids: rising magically out of the lake, it was condemned to disappear under the assaults of foreign conquest. Mexico took four centuries to regain the population of those times.
Pictured is Diego Rivera's mural in Mexico City's Palacio Nacional showing the city of Tenochtitlan in Aztec times.

Open veins of latin america, galeano