Templo Mayor
The main temple of Tenochtitlan, buried under Mexico City for four and a half centuries and found in 1978 when electricity workers laying cable hit a carved monolith over three metres across. Excavation has run continuously ever since, and in March 2026 archaeologists announced that six offerings recovered across three different decades had all been buried in a single ceremony.
Field Guide Entry
Found by the electricity company
On 21 February 1978, workers laying cable behind the Sagrario of the Metropolitan Cathedral struck a carved stone more than three metres across. It was the Coyolxauhqui monolith, showing the dismembered body of the moon goddess of Mexica myth. Archaeologists had known roughly where the Templo Mayor lay for a long time, and had argued for decades about excavating under one of the densest parts of the colonial city. The monolith settled the argument. The Proyecto Templo Mayor began that year under Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, who directed it until 1982. The site museum opened in 1987.
What was there
The temple was the ceremonial centre of Tenochtitlan, a stepped pyramid carrying two shrines at its summit, one to Huitzilopochtli and one to Tlaloc. It was enlarged seven times, each new structure raised over the last, so the surviving phases sit inside one another like a set of boxes. After the fall of the city in 1521 the Spanish pulled it down and used the stone to build the colonial capital on top of it, which is why the Metropolitan Cathedral stands a few metres from the excavated platform.
One ceremony, forty-five years of digging
In March 2026 the National Institute of Anthropology and History announced a result from the Templo Mayor Project, led by the archaeologist Antonio Marín Calvo with the conservator Adriana Sanromán Peyron. Six stone boxes, or tepetlacalli, had been recovered from the site at very different times: offerings 18 and 19 in the late 1970s, offering 97 in the 1990s, and offerings 186, 187 and 189 in 2023. Studied together, they proved to be a single deposit, placed during one ceremony in the reign of Moctezuma I between 1440 and 1469.
Between them the six boxes held 83 greenstone figures carved in the Mezcala style, 43 of them from the recent excavation, along with more than 4,000 marine shells and molluscs brought from the Atlantic coast, spheres of copal, snake-shaped pendants, and traces of the red and white pigment applied when they were buried. It is described as the first complete set of offerings at the site that can be tied to a named ruler, and the first time in nearly five decades of digging that a full ritual circuit around the temple has been mapped. The pieces were placed on one day. Recovering them took forty-five years.
Visiting Information
Open Tuesday to Sunday from 9am to 5pm and closed on Mondays for maintenance. Admission is 100 pesos. Entry is free for under 13s, students, teachers, seniors, pensioners and retirees with valid identification, and free for everyone on Sundays for Mexican nationals and residents. The ticket covers both the archaeological zone and the museum.
Most visitors spend 2 to 3 hours on the excavation and the museum together. The walkways through the excavation are outdoors and largely unshaded, so the morning is the more comfortable slot, and the museum's eight halls are the part most people underestimate. The entrance is on Seminario, a short walk from the Zócalo, with Metro Zócalo on Line 2 the nearest station.
Field Gallery
No approved field photos yet. You could be first.
Community Notes
No community notes yet.
La Llorona
0 miMexico's most enduring ghost story, about a weeping woman who drowned her own children and now wanders waterways searching for them, first documented in 16th-century Mexico City and still reported along canals, rivers, and borderlands from Xochimilco to the American Southwest.
Mercado de Sonora
1 miMexico City's main public market for traditional medicine and folk religion, a municipal market hall opened in 1957 whose back aisles grew into the country's largest working trade in herbal remedies, Santa Muerte devotion, Santería offerings and limpias. Roughly two thousand people a week come for that section specifically, and they come to buy and to consult rather than to look.
Altar de la Santa Muerte
1 miA life-size Santa Muerte has stood in a glass case on the pavement outside Alfarería 12 since Halloween 2001, when Enriqueta Romero moved the figure out of her house and made a private devotion public. The Catholic Church calls the devotion blasphemy and the army has bulldozed shrines in other cities. This one was left alone.
Templo de San Hipólito
1 miThe largest church in Latin America dedicated to San Judas Tadeo, patron of lost and desperate causes, standing on the ground where Hernán Cortés ordered a monument to the Spanish soldiers killed fleeing Tenochtitlan. Devotees fill Avenida Hidalgo on the 28th of every month, and on 28 October the city closes the surrounding streets.
