Xochimilco preserves part of the lake-based landscape that once filled the southern Basin of Mexico. Long before Spanish conquest, communities engineered shallow wetlands into chinampas, rectangular agricultural plots separated by canals. Farmers built them by staking boundaries and layering mud, vegetation, and organic material, while trees helped stabilize the edges. The plots were not literally floating islands. Their fertile soils and controlled moisture supported intensive cultivation and supplied food and flowers to settlements around the lakes, including the Mexica capital Tenochtitlan.

The Xochimilca developed a powerful city-state before Mexica expansion brought the area into the Aztec imperial system during the fifteenth century. Canoes moved people, crops, tribute, and goods through an extensive network of canals and lakes. After the Spanish conquest, epidemic disease, Christian missionization, new political institutions, and colonial landholding transformed local society. Churches and towns appeared within the inherited waterscape. Indigenous farmers nevertheless maintained chinampa agriculture, adapting crops, tools, markets, and community organization under colonial rule.

Drainage projects gradually eliminated most of the Basin of Mexico’s lakes as the capital expanded and sought flood control. Xochimilco survived as a residual wetland because its canals and cultivated plots remained useful. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, railways, roads, urban growth, groundwater extraction, and engineered water systems changed its hydrology. Decorative trajinera boats and canal excursions made the district a popular recreational landscape. Tourism created income and a vivid public identity, but the busiest routes represent only one part of a larger agricultural and residential system.

UNESCO included Xochimilco with the historic center of Mexico City in its 1987 World Heritage inscription. The remaining chinampas provide the strongest surviving evidence of pre-Hispanic land use in the basin. They are threatened by polluted water, subsidence, invasive species, illegal construction, abandonment of cultivation, fragmented canals, and pressure from metropolitan expansion. The endangered axolotl has become a symbol of ecological restoration. Farmers, scientists, community groups, and public agencies use canal cleaning, refuges, water management, and renewed agriculture to protect the landscape.

Xochimilco is historically important because production, settlement, transport, ritual, and ecology remain inseparable. A restored canal without working farms would preserve only part of the system, while agriculture cannot endure without clean water and viable markets. Modern greenhouses, roads, boats, and neighborhoods show continuing adaptation but can also damage historic patterns. The landscape should not be romanticized as an untouched Aztec survival. It is a living, contested remnant shaped by Indigenous engineering, colonial change, urban water policy, tourism, conservation, and the daily labor of chinampa communities.