Chapultepec Lake

Chapultepec Lake was dug during the effort to save the forest from a shortage of water. A natural body of water fed by local springs had existed nearby before, but the present shores were created by people. In the early eighteen nineties, artesian wells depleted the springs. The old ahuehuetes—bald cypresses for which Chapultepec was famous—were drying up; some had to be cut down before they fell on visitors. City residents demanded that the trees’ death be stopped.

In eighteen ninety-five, President Porfirio Díaz decided to live permanently in the castle and assigned the forest’s redevelopment to a special commission. It was headed by José Yves Limantour, the finance minister responsible to Díaz for this official project. Limantour wanted to create a public park here modeled on Paris’s Bois de Boulogne and prepare it for the centennial of the start of the War of Independence. This required water: without it, both the old trees and the new plantings were dying.

Under the commission’s direction, the government bought the river runoff from the haciendas of Los Morales and La Ascensión. Workers brought water to Chapultepec through covered ditches and built Lago Menor—a reservoir with a capacity of fifteen thousand cubic meters and a Portland cement bottom. It was used to water the green areas. By eighteen ninety-eight, more than one hundred fifty thousand plants had been grown in the new nursery.

The workers then turned to Lago Mayor, with a capacity of forty thousand cubic meters. To remove the earth, they laid a narrow-gauge railway. The soil was used to fill pits, level the recently added sections, and build up hills. By the summer of nineteen oh one, the lake bed and a bridge over the future connecting canal were ready; later, the islet and the shores were completed.

The waterworks complex was put into operation in nineteen oh two, and boats occupied it almost immediately. In a single week, newspapers counted several capsized little boats carrying students, foreigners, and families who had come for an outing. No one was seriously hurt: the shallow lake got away with frightened passengers and wet clothes. There were already not enough boats for everyone who wanted one. Limantour himself hosted tea for families from the capital on the islet, after which the guests went boating.

The official opening of the two lakes did not take place until September twenty-second, nineteen ten. Avenida Colegio Militar still runs between Lago Mayor and Lago Menor, with the connecting canal beneath it, and the fountain in the center of Lago Mayor dates from the same redevelopment. Today’s outing in a rented boat repeats an activity that began here eight years before the official opening.