Mexico City, Mexico, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Templo Mayor anchors the Mexico City week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the Mexico City puzzle set.
Mexico City's Day of the Dead parade — now one of the world's most spectacular public celebrations — didn't actually exist until the 2015 James Bond film 'Spectre' invented it for an opening scene. The city liked it so much they made it a real annual event starting in 2016.
Source: Lonely Planet, mexicoinsider.mxThe Aztecs employed 1,000 public sanitation workers who swept and watered the streets of Tenochtitlan daily — at a time when European cities were dumping chamber pots out windows. Human waste was collected by canoe from public latrines in every neighborhood and sold as fertilizer for the floating chinampas gardens.
Source: IWA Publishing, mexicolore.co.ukIn Aztec Tenochtitlan, urine was so valuable it was stored in ceramic pots in nearly every household and sold at market — it was used as a mordant (fixative) for dyeing cloth and as a chemical agent for tanning animal hides.
Source: IWA Publishing, Ocean Sewage AllianceMexico City is sinking at a rate of up to 50 cm (20 inches) per year in some areas because it sits on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco. Since 1891, parts of the city have dropped more than 7 meters (23 feet) — and the sinking is accelerating as the underground aquifer is depleted.
Source: geo-mexico.com, funworldfacts.comThe Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City's ornate opera house, has sunk approximately 4 meters since construction began in 1904. Its original ground floor is now a subterranean basement, and the building's weight on the soft lakebed clay continues to pull it downward.
Source: Britannica, voicemap.me