Lake Texcoco Ecological Park—which opened two years ago, becoming one of the largest urban parks in the world, covering 55 square miles—has its share of challenges. It is difficult to reach without a car. Squatters continue to build homes in its El Caracol section. And farmers from the settlements of Texcoco, Atenco, and Chimalhuacán are demanding compensation for lands that were expropriated for the controversial, and now canceled, New Mexico City International Airport (NAICM) previously being built on its lands. There is work that was paid for, but that will never be completed, for that enormous planned airport. All of this is true.
Architect Iñaki Echeverría, director of the project, starts by acknowledging the first issue, the main point of contention for many: accessibility. “Obviously, I knew accessibility wouldn’t be completely resolved to everyone’s satisfaction,” he says. Faced with budgetary constraints, Echeverría had to choose: “Either we focus on resolving all the legal and accessibility issues, or we create this park, clean it up, and create a showcase demonstrating that restoration efforts like this one are viable.”
The story of the park begins in 2014, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico at the time, announced plans for a new transport hub for Mexico City. It would be built on the largely dry bed of Lake Texcoco, the body of water that had once surrounded Mexico City’s ancient ancestor, Tenochtitlán, the center of the Aztec empire. The marketing promise was that NAICM would be one of the greenest airports in the world. The terminal, designed by Norman Foster—winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1999 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2009—was going to be the first to obtain LEED platinum certification, the highest international recognition for energy efficiency and sustainable design.
Its site, Lake Texcoco, had already lost more than 95 percent of its original surface area, and in 2015 plans were made to drain it completely to build the airport. However, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexico’s president in 2018, he canceled the plan. It would end up costing more than $13 billion and would leave behind serious environmental damage: The incomplete project destroyed a key refuge for migratory birds; carved up mountains in the State of Mexico (the federal region that surrounds Mexico City); razed agricultural land; and altered the landscape of the cultural capital of the Nahua, an indigenous people that includes the Mexica (or Aztecs).
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. “It felt like I was stepping onto Mars,” says the architect, reflecting on being placed at the helm of the project. The park covers an area equivalent to 21 times the area of Mexico City’s enormous Bosque de Chapultepec park. Echeverría offers his own comparisons: “This place is three times the size of the city of Oaxaca and, as a reference for those outside Mexico, it’s roughly three times the size of Manhattan.”
The restoration project wasn’t a mere whim of Mexico’s new president, but the culmination of a century of visions and plans. “We’ve been skating around this for 75 years,” Echeverría says, citing restoration projects that were proposed as early as 1913, including ones by Miguel Ángel de Quevedo (a celebrated early environmentalist) in the 1930s and agronomist Gonzalo Blanco Macías in the 1950s. What was missing, Echeverría says, “wasn’t a lack of ideas, but of political will.”
The wetlands within the park represent a small portion of what was once a much larger oasis that was drained over the centuries. This process began with the founding of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in the 14th century and progressed rapidly under the empire’s Spanish conquerors, who drained most of the lake. “Perhaps if we had been conquered by the Venetians, things would have been different,” Echeverría says. “But here, they had to tame the swamps. They were wetlands, and they destroyed them.”
The area of the lake, which in 1521 covered 232 square miles, had fallen to 154 square miles by 1608. At the end of the 18th century, in José Antonio Alzate’s map, known as the Mapa de las Aguas (the Map of the Waters), the lakes in the Mexico basin are isolated, separated by vast tracts of land. By 1856, Lake Texcoco had shrunk to 135 square miles; at the beginning of the 20th century, it was only 103 square miles; and in the 1960s, all that was left was barely 62 square miles.
Ahead of the construction of the proposed airport, further modifications were made to the former wetlands. Nine rivers were diverted to the Dren General del Valle, a drainage channel, including the Papalotla, Coxcacoaco, and Texcoco rivers, while 16 hydraulic works were built to prevent water from reaching the new airport site. Almost 24 miles of tunnels were built to send water to the north of the Mexico Valley Basin. Between 60 and 80 hills in 15 municipalities were mined for gravel, increasing desertification, health impacts, and wind erosion in the region. In addition, the development ramped up pressure on the already threatened water security of the Valley of Mexico.
“Everything was arid and red,” explains Echeverría, “and I was surprised to see how much the area had changed. Places I knew from 20 years ago were completely altered or destroyed. I also felt a bit of disbelief at the damage that construction and engineering was capable of.”
But in March 2022, the land for the park was declared a Protected Natural Area, an important step in reversing the impact of these engineering works. To Echeverría, after many years of trying to kickstart the restoration of Lake Texacoco, it seemed as though the fortunes of the area had finally changed. “I had worked on the project for many years. I had mourned it and buried it, and then suddenly it was as if it had been resurrected. The lake refused to die and we were here to help it. It really is a very courageous step for the future of the Valley of Mexico. I felt incredibly excited to be able to take up the lake again.”
Echeverría’s resolve would define the project. “I’d rather have someone come along now and say that while we haven’t solved the accessibility issue, there’s somewhere to go,” he says. In a megacity with tens of millions of people commuting every day, restoring the valley’s watershed, providing green spaces for residents, and mitigating climate change is no small feat.
Debate surrounding the canceled airport can blind people to the park’s true potential, Echeverría says. “This intervention and the protection of this area keep alive an opportunity for a viable future for the Valley of Mexico. That is the most important aspect of the project, in my opinion.”
I first visited the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park two years ago. Now, at the end of 2025, the water seems to be reclaiming its place. The rains of recent months have caused the land to flood and birds to repopulate the lakes and float on the blue-green waters, peeking out from the plants. Cyclists, skaters, and soccer players make use of the park.
The area is home to more than 60 percent of the bird diversity in the State of Mexico, including species like the Mexican duck (Anas diazi), and it’s a refuge for a large number of migratory birds, such as the snowy plover (Charadrius nivosus) and western sandpiper (Calidris mauri). It receives an annual average of 150,000 waterfowl and shorebirds that travel along the central flyway, a migratory route that runs down North America. Due to the abundance of birds found here, this wetland is designated as an Area of Importance for Bird Conservation in Mexico (AICA), and approximately 78 percent of the proposed Protected Natural Area is located within the AICA. Of the roughly 19,500 acres identified as priority areas for conservation, 65 percent received an even higher designation—as urgent priorities.
The park’s increasing green areas won’t benefit only birds—they’ll also regulate temperatures, lower health costs by mitigating particulate (PM 10) pollution, capture CO2, raise biodiversity more generally, and establish better flood control. The site will be able to capture more than 1.4 million tons of carbon per year through its green and wooded areas. Environmental efforts such as grazing, reforestation, increasing protected green areas, and the recovery and remediation of water bodies will result in a reduction in bare soil, according to the National Commission for Protected Areas.
The area has also been designated as a Ramsar Site, recognizing it as a wetland of international importance. It is key to the regulation of water in the Valley of Mexico, benefiting millions of residents of the metropolitan area.
Echeverría is not seeking to restore the lake to its pristine state of 700 years ago. He is implementing what he calls “living engineering” or a “soft infrastructure,” a concept that merges design with engineering and prioritizes evolving strategies over rigid plans. “When your design is more of a strategy, it becomes flexible and therefore more resilient to uncertainty,” he says.
Instead of building the wetlands from scratch, Echeverría has reused portions of the abandoned airport and previous hydraulic projects. The method consists of letting nature do its work. Echeverría talks, for example, about the nine rivers that supply water to the area: “We reconnected them, which allowed two things to happen. One is that lagoons continue to form, and the other is that the water became cleaner and conditions improved.”
This work will allow the recovery of a number of important bodies of water located in the park, including the Ciénega de San Juan, the Xalapango and Texcoco Norte Lagunas, and Nabor Carrillo Lake. These are all essential for migratory birds, as well as local fish and frog species.
The philosophy behind Echeverría’s work wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was formed in New York, through the study of urban design via landscape design and observing how natural systems operate. His working methodology was also inspired by studying the work of theologian Raimon Panikkar, who focused on syncretism and the union of opposites.
For Echeverría, that was the key to a project that had been defined by conflict. “The issue of hybridization was what interested me most in all this. Because many mythological beings actually illustrate hybridization and the union of opposites,” he explains. “What I was trying to do was talk about opposites. About infrastructure and the city, but also about the countryside and the landscape. Different places and ideas that are always in dialectical opposition. I wasn’t interested in dialectics as a method, I was more interested in the idea of dialogue. That’s where a lot of my working methodology came from.”
The project is a rejection of the logic “that all this can be fixed with pipes,” as Echeverría characterizes some approaches to Mexico’s water drainage issues. He compares that approach to that of simply building more roads to solve traffic problems. “No matter how many roads you build, car dealers will always sell more cars, and they will fill them up.” In contrast, the park functions as a “buffer zone” that absorbs water to “give the drainage time to work,” without flooding the city. The architecture itself follows this philosophy of resilience. “We use precast concrete,” he explains, because “it allows for easier replacement work” and guarantees “a quality of work that is not easy to achieve when you have on-site production.”
For Echeverría, what has been achieved at Lake Texcoco has lessons for other depleted environments. The climate crisis—one of the greatest threats to ecosystems around the world—is not a death sentence, but rather a call for innovation. “The good news is that because we’ve done things so badly, there’s a lot of room for improvement,” he says. “This moment of crisis is the perfect moment for creative industries and for people with ideas. Anything goes and everything can be reimagined.”
This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español. It was translated from Spanish by John Newton.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
