Metro Bondojito

Metro Bondojito is one of the great elevated “spaceship” stations on Line 4 of the Mexico City Metro. International visitors often ride the line to see the views of the east of the city from here. But it’s on passing beneath some stretches of Line 4 that the true scale of the line needs to be understood.

People regularly using the station come from the neighborhoods of Tablas de San Agustín, Belisario Dominguez and Bondojito itself. All are in Gustavo A. Madero today. If one can imagine the area prior to the city, it was mostly marshland, and one brimming with nopal cactus.

The station logo comes from that very cactus. The name, though, is from the Otomí language. It’s one of very few places names in the City to thus derive. The word simply means that specific edible plant. Most of the nopal consumed in Mexico are Opuntia ficus-indica. There are about a 113 other species of the much loved cactus in Mexico and especially in the central part of the country.

During the colonial period, as the lake dried or withdrew, the area was on the western edge of the giant Aragón Hacienda just to the east. Today, one can easily walk to the Mercado Rio Blanco, just five minutes south of the station. The famous Mercado Bondojito is a bit further, about 15 minutes to the east along the Avenida Henry Ford.