Hundreds of tourists throng the canals of Xochimilco every weekend for a flamboyant display of sombreros, food, music and art. Yet, as they cruise alongside the chinampas, or "floating gardens ...

Chinampas, or man-made islands for crop farming, date back to Aztec times. Skip links Skip to Content ... The chinampas once provided for the 1.5 million Aztecs in Tenochtitlan.

Luis Zambrano, a biologist at UNAM who oversees the chinampas project with the farmers, arrived in Xochimilco in the early 2000s to research the axolotl, or Ambystoma mexicanum.

“This great system (chinampas) is all that’s left from the lake city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, so I always tell our visitors that Xochimilco is a living archeological zone,” Cruz said.

The chinampas in use today go back about a thousand years, to when Aztec farmers began building rectangular fields on top of vast lakes and growing food for what was then the city of Tenochtitlan.

Luis Zambrano, a biologist at UNAM who oversees the chinampas project with the farmers, arrived in Xochimilco in the early 2000s to research the axolotl, or Ambystoma mexicanum.

In Mexico City, a 700-year-old Aztec farming technique is giving a sustainable edge to modern agriculture. It was early on a Sunday morning, and I was in the Floating Gardens of Xochimilco, 28km ...

Yet, as they cruise alongside the chinampas, or "floating gardens", most remain oblivious to the fact that they are looking at an ancient engineering wonder. ... They called it Tenochtitlan.