Lomas de Chapultepec

The history of Lomas de Chapultepec is the chronicle of a geography that, from its origin, tried to be different. Its founding in 1921 marked a turning point in the development of Mexico City: it not only prompted the extension of the emblematic Calzada del Emperador — laid out by Maximilian and consolidated as Paseo de la Reforma by Lerdo de Tejada and Porfirio Díaz — but proposed a model of living that broke with the tradition of the city center.

In its early days, Las Lomas was an inhospitable place, a deforested ridge separated from the urban sprawl that offered magnificent views to anyone looking to escape the “agglomeration of houses” of the city. The partners of the Chapultepec Heights Company, Albert E. Blair and Paul Heilman, put it plainly in a bulletin published in 1923: “to inhabit the Modern Home is a family duty, a necessary change toward a way of life conditioned by the standards of hygiene and spaciousness of the age”.

On that premise, the neighborhood embraced a layout of winding streets and generous sidewalks that suggested a slower rhythm. That design came, however, with strict land-use rules that forced a car-dependent way of life, since its exclusively residential character restricted commerce to very specific areas.

The landscape we now associate naturally with lush, privileged tree cover was in fact the fruit of a slow transformation. What is today the most wooded area of the capital began as a plain stripped of vegetation, where the planting of every species was a deliberate act.

The development consolidated slowly, moving from a neighborhood conceived for the upper middle class toward a residential area of absolute exclusivity by the middle of the twentieth century. The quiet that defined it until the 1960s finally gave way, however, under the weight of metropolitan expansion.

That “garden neighborhood” ended up becoming the forced channel for traffic coming from Bosques de las Lomas and, later, from the real estate development of Santa Fe. Its wide avenues, which at the start of the century promised peace, now yield more and more to the overwhelming weight of a city that devours everything.