Tacuba Area

Tacuba is today a neighborhood in Mexico City. It's best known for constituting the western end of the Calzada Mexico-Tacuba. But it's a deeply historical and ancient area of Mexico City. Three of Miguel Hidalgo's five original settlements are parts of ancient Tacuba.

It's also, lamentably, one of the area's where Mexico City learned to start treasuring and preserving the past. The 1970 opening of the Metro Tacuba station showed only too well that some great part of the ancient town was being lost forever.

The ancient people of Tlacopan, as Tacuba was then known, joined with the peoples of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco against Azcapotzalco. The resulting Triple Alliance ushered in 100 years that saw Tenochtitlan reach the very height of its civilization.

Tacuba remained important through the colonial period. A distant agricultural town, it was the seat of surrounding haciendas, orchards, and rich agricultural territory.

Today, the colonial era church (finished in 1584) stands at the center of a densely populated, historical region.

On the map: (beginning clockwise in the north), the historical town included San Alvaro, now part of Azcapotzalco. To the east, the causeway touched land again at Popotla. Today's neighborhood is in two parts. To the south is the Colonia Pensil San Juanico. In the west are the neighborhoods of Legaria, and Torre Blanca, and westernmost, San Diego Ocoyoaca. Finally, in the corner beneath the giant Parque Bicentenario, the tiny neighborhood of Ángel Zimbron is also split between Miguel Hidalgo and Azcapotzalco.