Conquering the Aztecs

After a restful morning we enjoy lunch together and then afterwards stroll around the Zocalo, the Americas' biggest square, presided over by the vast Colonial cathedral. We shall have a first glimpse of the Aztecs' ruined Great Temple before visiting the National Palace to admire Diego Rivera's vivid murals about the Aztecs, the Spanish Conquest and its consequences. Before dinner, your Guide Lecturer will sum up the main phases of the long historical sequence as background for the explorations to come.

Our exploration continues as we explore the sprawling Great Temple, the very heart of the Aztec empire and scene of mass human sacrifice. The site museum is superb in both the exhibits and its design. We then drive to the National Museum of Anthropology, one of the world's great collections of archaeology and traditional crafts, and the first museum to express Mexico's thrilling Modernist tradition of design. After lunch here, we shall explore the galleries for a general introduction to the history of the indigenous peoples from Ice Age to today. The layout makes a climax of the compelling Aztec sculptures.

Today, we travel to Teotihuacan, known as the Place of the Gods by the Aztecs, awestruck as they were by the ruins. The biggest city in the Americas 1500 years ago, Teotihuacan is dominated by what they dubbed the ‘Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon’ and the long ‘Avenue of the Dead’. We also visit the superb site museum which will help us to assess the origins of the Aztecs. In the afternoon, we shall visit Acolman for its monastery of St Augustine, where lay-out and decoration express clearly the challenge that faced the early missionaries.

This morning, we cross the mountains to Zultepec, an Aztec site where archaeologists have unearthed the gory remains of probably the very first column of Spanish colonists, captured and then gradually treated to the traditional fate of enemies. We proceed to Texcotzingo, a water garden attributed to the 15^th century wise warrior-ruler and poet, Nezahualcoyotl. From up here, he could have looked all across his kingdom.

Our day starts with a tour of the extensive ruins of Tula, long held to be the capital of the Toltecs, whom the Aztecs saw as lords of a Golden Age. The centre of the site is dominated by pyramids and ball courts. Controversy continues as to the role of Tula in the centuries before the rise of the Aztecs. The afternoon takes us across the great plain to Guanajuato, a colonial city established in the 1540s in order to exploit the gold and silver found here. The unusual town plan was forced on the colonists by the lie of the land.

Today we explore colonial Guanajuato and its surroundings which were central to the world’s production of silver and gold. The wealth accrued made Guanajuato one of the most affluent cities, as is evident in its Churrigueresque architecture, a Mexican development of the Baroque. We shall explore both the bitter industry and the art. La Valenciana boasts one of Mexico's finest Baroque churches. Nearby, we shall find the surface remains of one of the mines. After enjoying the view down into the city itself, we can stroll its streets.

Travelling further west than the Aztecs ever dared, we head into the land of the Tarascans or Purépecha, their deadliest foes. We shall pause, on the way, in Mexico's elegant pink city, Morelia, with its fine, generous colonial centre. We end the day in Pátzcuaro, which was founded in the 14^th century as the capital of the Tarascans after their leader Tariácuri, subdued the indigenous peoples living in the area. The town retains charming colonial architecture in stone and brick with cobbled streets around a lovely, peaceful central square.

Today we explore two later capitals of the ancient Tarascans. They were the Aztecs' most formidable foe with an empire of their own governed on a completely different basis from the Aztecs'. The Tarascans had Mexico's longest tradition of metalwork, producing both jewellery and weapons. We start the day with a visit to Tzintzuntzan whose distinctive ruins are sited with a view that would have looked auspicious to any ancient Mexican. We proceed to Ihuatzio, first inhabited by people apparently related to the Aztecs before it became a capital of the Tarascans in the 13^th century.

Our journey today is a grand transect of country back to the Aztec world. It brings us to Cuernavaca, whose climate beckoned centuries of elites to make their homes here, from Mexico City's wealthy today to the Spanish Conqueror himself and the Aztecs before him. We shall visit Cortés's palace, with its murals by Diego Rivera, which documented Cortés unsympathetically and the Mexican Revolution's populist faction sympathetically. We can admire the cathedral too, where one wall painting mourns the martyrdom of Mexico's pioneering mission to Japan.

We start with a visit to Malinalco, said by the Aztecs to be founded by Malinalxóchitl, goddess of witchcraft. We shall clamber up to the distinctive shrine that the Aztecs carved from into the rock. We continue to the 16^th century Temple and Monastery of the Divine Saviour, celebrated for its Plateresque façade and, above all, for its murals, including a depiction of the Garden of Eden in Aztec style - an insight into the early stages of conversion to Christianity.

Today encapsulates the whole tour. We start with the ancient ruins at Xochicalco where we see pyramids and ball courts dating from between the era of Teotihuacan and the Aztecs. They are doubly intriguing, as proof of a continuous tradition that the Aztecs themselves sometimes denied and as evidence for a connection with the Maya, far away to the east, seen in the design of the Feathered Serpent on one of the pyramids and the figures shown seated calmly in its coils. We end the day at Taxco, where we find a small but important colonial mining town very carefully restored and with one of Mexico's most striking church façades.

This morning we return to the Valley of Mexico and visit the UNESCO listed site of Xochimilco, which preserves some of the canals and prolific wetland farms of the Aztec capital. We explore the shady water ways as the Aztecs would have, by boat. Afterwards, we proceed to the airport for our individual flights home.