Dynastic History | Catedral Metropolitana, Mexico City — One Stone Went Up the Tower, the Other Went Under a Patio

The Plaza Mayor was being levelled, drained and paved under Viceroy Revillagigedo when the ground gave up two Mexica monuments in one year. On 13 August 1790 workers struck the colossal Coatlicue, lifted clear that September. On 17 December 1790 they found a basalt disc about 3.6 metres across, lying some 40 centimetres down, west of the viceregal palace: the stone later called the Piedra del Sol, reported by the city's works architect José Damián Ortiz de Castro.

Two finds, two decisions by the same administration. The calendar stone was set in 1791 against the base of the cathedral's west tower, in the open, where Alexander von Humboldt and others came to study it; it stayed there until 1885, went to the Museo Nacional on Moneda Street, and has stood in the Museo Nacional de Antropología since 1964. The Coatlicue was carried to the university and buried in its patio, because people were coming at night to leave offerings in front of it. Humboldt had it dug out in 1803; it was covered over again. Antonio de León y Gama described both stones in 1792.

The cathedral above all this stands on the ground of the Mexica sacred precinct, and the first church here was raised with stone from the temple it replaced; the present building was begun in 1573 to Claudio de Arciniega's design and finished only in the nineteenth century. It has been sinking since it was built, and was underpinned in the 1990s. Mass is said daily.

📸 Cover: the Metropolitan Cathedral and Sagrario from the Zócalo — the west tower is the left-hand one, Ulisesmorales, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons