Plaza de las Tres Culturas - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Plaza de las Tres Culturas ("Square of the Three Cultures") is the main square within the Tlatelolco

Tlatelolco (Mexico City)

Tlatelolco is an area in the Cuauhtémoc borough of Mexico City, centered on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, a square surrounded on three sides by an excavated Aztec archaeological site, a 17th century church called Templo de Santiago, a former convent, and office complexes that used to belong to...

neighbourhood of Mexico City

Mexico City

Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...

. The name "Three Cultures" is in recognition of the three periods of Mexican history

History of Mexico

The history of Mexico, a country located in the southern portion of North America, covers a period of more than two millennia. First populated more than 13,000 years ago, the country produced complex indigenous civilizations before being conquered by the Spanish in the 16th Century.Since the...

reflected by those buildings pre-Columbian

Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...

, Spanish colonial

New Spain

New Spain, formally called the Viceroyalty of New Spain , was a viceroyalty of the Spanish colonial empire, comprising primarily territories in what was known then as 'América Septentrional' or North America. Its capital was Mexico City, formerly Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire...

, and the independent "mestizo

Mestizo

Mestizo is a term traditionally used in Latin America, Philippines and Spain for people of mixed European and Native American heritage or descent...

" nation. The plaza, designed by Mexican architect and urbanist Mario Pani

Mario Pani

Mario Pani Darqui was a Mexican architect and urbanist, one of the most active under the rule of president Miguel Alemán Valdés...

, was completed in 1966.

The square contains the remains of Aztec

Aztec

The Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.Aztec is the...

temples and is flanked by the Santiago de Tlatelolco Catholic

Catholic

The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

church, built in the 16th century. and a massive housing complex built in 1964.

The former headquarters of the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (foreign ministry) also stands on the southern edge of the square. This headquarters now houses a memorial museum called "Memorial 68", opened by UNAM

Unam

UNAM or UNaM may refer to:* National University of Misiones, a National University in Posadas, Argentina*National Autonomous University of Mexico , the large public autonomous university based in Mexico City...

in October 2007, to remember the 1968 Mexican student demonstrations and the Tlatelolco Massacre

Tlatelolco massacre

The Tlatelolco massacre, also known as The Night of Tlatelolco , was a government massacre of student and civilian protesters and bystanders that took place during the afternoon and night of October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City...

victims and survivors. On the south side of the Plaza stands a large stone memorial erected on October 2, 1993, the 25th anniversary of the massacre, in memory of the hundreds killed.

See also