![]() The growing costs – social, economic, health and environmental – are a source of stress and conflict. It also creates a paradox: although Mexico City has more rainy days than London, it suffers shortages more in keeping with a desert, making the price of each litre among the highest in the world – despite its often dire quality. Discharging a resource that falls freely from the heavens and replacing it with exactly the same H 2O from far away is expensive, inefficient, energy intensive and ultimately inadequate for the population’s needs. Yet, from the point of view of sustainability and social equality, it is also among the more absurd failures. If mastery over water is a marker of civilisation, then Mexico City is surely one of mankind’s most spectacular achievements. Getting the required billions of litres up to this megalopolis – 2,400m above sea level – is one of the world’s great feats of hydro-engineering. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadores rapidly accelerated the process, and modern engineers have almost finished the task, replacing the lacustrine marshes with a grey sea of concrete, tarmac and steel that, in the central city alone, is now home to almost nine million residents.Īs a result, supplies for drinking, washing, cooking and cleaning must be pumped up from hundreds of metres underground, or from a distance of more than 100km. The vast lakes that once filled the plain were, however, steadily drained by settlers. This geological, historical fact is a reason why the Aztecs built a city of floating gardens here 700 years ago that became known as “the Venice of the New World”. The floods are a reminder of the natural order of things: water belongs here. Gently at first with a mid-afternoon patter on windows and windscreens, then more urgently with an evening downpour that turns splashes into puddles, until finally – with a nighttime climax of thunder and lightning rolling down from the distant volcanos – the deluge gushes through gutters and gullies, transforming trickles in runnels into torrents in tunnels. W hen a tormenta sweeps in to Mexico City, the rain does not just fall, it insists.
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