Aztec Flora and Fauna

According to Alejandro de Avila (Flora: The Aztec Herbal), Mexico boasts one of the richest and most complex floras on the planet, with an estimated total of between 23,000 and 30,000 species.
We’re delighted to launch these pages in collaboration with Renee McGarry, doctoral candidate in art history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her dissertation, Exotic Contact: Flora and Fauna in Mexica (Aztec) Visual Culture, considers how plants and animals are represented in Aztec sculpture and painted books.

Photo of a Resplendent Quetzal courtesy of Steve Bird/Birdseekers.

‘Why no bears in Aztec mythology?’

Read of the important links between the Aztecs and the pelican...

Hear the (brief!) sound of a hummingbird - Tlacatecco website

Plants and animals had a strong cosmomagical

meaning in the lives of the Mexica/Aztecs

The rare and endangered axolotl

- and its cultural importance in Mexico

The rattlesnake was associated with Venus

in Mesoamerican mythology

‘Is it true an Aztec person could be killed

for cutting down a tree...?’

The sunflower - one of Mexico’s

many gifts to the world...

From Olmec to Aztec, the jaguar

prowls the art of most ancient Mexican civilisations

For the Mexica the eagle hunts like a sunbeam,

and leads the sun across the sky...

Cacti have been a source of food

and medicine for millennia

The career of dog breeder must have

been a lucrative one in pre-Hispanic Mexico

Grasshoppers

had a Jekyll & Hyde nature - so very Aztec!

The astonishing Axayacatl

nourished the growing Aztec empire

Rare, stunningly beautiful, elusive, an artist’s dream

- is the quetzal the ultimate symbol of beauty?

Molluscs were both useful

and symbolic in the Mexica empire

While frogs helped feed the Aztecs,

toads helped feed their religion...