Mexico City is one of the most crowded cities on earth. It’s estimated anywhere from 21 million to 26 million people live in its metro area, packed into a high-altitude basin with mountains on every side and not nearly enough flat land to go around. When space runs out, people build wherever they can.
In the Iztapalapa district on the eastern edge of the city, that meant building inside a volcano.
Tepepolco, or Cerro del Tepepolco, is a small dormant volcano that last erupted over 10,000 years ago. Its crater, a natural bowl in the earth, sat there for thousands of years doing nothing. So residents moved in.
Thousands of people now live inside it. Streets wind down into the bowl. Houses are built up the inner walls. From the air it looks like a normal dense neighborhood, except it happens to be sitting inside a volcano crater.
Nobody worries about it erupting. Tepepolco has been geologically dead for longer than recorded human history. It’s just land at this point, and in a city of millions, land doesn’t stay empty for long.
Thousands of People Live Inside an Ancient Volcano in Mexico City
