Rain buried a major airport in Mexico
The story of this park begins in 2014, when then Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced his plans for a new transportation hub for Mexico City. It is built on the dry bed of Lake Teccoco, a body of water that once surrounded Mexico City’s ancient ancestor, Tenochtitlan, the center of the Aztec Empire. The marketing promise was that NAICM would be one of the greenest airports in the world. Designed by Norman Foster – winner of the 1999 Pritzker Prize and the 2009 Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts – the terminal was to be the first to receive LEED Platinum certification, the highest international accreditation for energy efficiency and sustainable design.
Its site, Lake Tekkoko, had lost more than 95 percent of its original area, and in 2015 plans were made to completely drain it to build an airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexico’s president in 2018, he scrapped the plan. The project will cost more than $13 billion and will cause serious environmental damage: the flawed project destroyed a key migratory bird sanctuary. Carved mountains in the state of Mexico (the federal district that surrounds Mexico City); destroyed agricultural lands; And it changed the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous people that included the Mexica (or Aztec).
Echeverría, who says he has been obsessed with the area for nearly three decades, was appointed by the new government to restore the local ecosystem. This architect, who was at the head of the project, says: “I felt like I was stepping on Mars. This park covers an area equal to 21 times the area of the huge Bosque de Chapultepec park in Mexico City. Echeverría offers his own comparisons: “It’s three times the size of Oaxaca City, and for reference for those outside of Mexico, it’s about three times the size of Manhattan.”
The restoration project was not just a whim of Mexico’s new president, but the culmination of a century of vision and planning. “We’ve been skating around for 75 years,” says Echuria, referring to restoration projects proposed as early as 1913, including those proposed by Miguel Angel de Quedo (a famous early environmentalist) in the 1930s and farmer Gonzalo Blanco Macias in the 1950s. What was missing, Echuria says, was “not a lack of ideas, but political will.”
