Map of the Week 107-Mexico City 1550

The Map of Mexico 1550 Project was designed by Lily Diaz, a professor at Media Lab Helsinki. The map is reputed to have been authored by Alonso de Santa Cruz, royal cosmographer to emperor Charles V of Spain. It resides at the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. She took a series of overlapping, stereo images of the map and pieced them together as one digital image. Then a series of historical points of interest were laid on top with descriptions, photos and web links. As you zoom in on regions of the map these squares will get larger and pop up information as you hover over them. The author's description of the map is below:

"Painted on two sheets of parchment joined together at the center, the map shows the city surrounded by water and with canals between its buildings. The clearly drawn roads over the mountains to other parts of the country permit us to retrace the routes taken by the Spanish conquerors. The map also provides abundant information about the ethnography and the flora and fauna of the region during the early colonial days"