Grief, Then Silence

La Llorona is a weeping woman whose story is told in different forms across Mexico and the American Southwest, including around the canals of Xochimilco. Scholars connect some traditions to Indigenous accounts recorded in the Florentine Codex, but the legend has no single established historical origin.

Begin on a trajinera boat through the canals of Xochimilco, the setting locals have linked for centuries to La Llorona, the weeping woman said to have drowned her own children and still search the waterways for them at night.

A chinampa in the canals of Xochimilco hung with hundreds of weathered dolls by one man over about fifty years. He drowned in 2001 in the same stretch of water where the story he told began.

The island is a separate boat trip of about 4 hours, hired by the boat rather than the seat, usually from Embarcadero Cuemanco. At the end is a chinampa covered in hundreds of decaying, sun-bleached dolls, hung there one at a time by a hermit who said he was honoring a girl he couldn't save from drowning.

One of the largest cities in the ancient world at its peak, built by a civilization whose name, language, and rulers remain unknown. The Aztecs found it already abandoned centuries later and named it "the place where the gods were created."

On day two, head north out of the city to the pyramids of Teotihuacán, once one of the largest cities on Earth, abandoned centuries before the Aztecs arrived and renamed it, in their own language, "the place where the gods were created."