The Santa Cruz Map is the earliest known city map of Mexico City as the Spanish capital. The map depicts the city with its important buildings, streets, and waterways surrounded by the lakes of the basin of the Valley of Mexico and the countryside beyond. It also represents images of social life, animals and plants. It was painted between 1550 and 1556 on parchment and is thought to have been created at the university at Tlatelolco, shown on the map.
Contents
The map gets its name from Alonso de Santa Cruz, court cartographer to Charles V (king of Spain at that time), and who for a while was considered author of the map. The map is currently in the archives of the Uppsala University library, from where it gets another of its names, the Uppsala map.
Orientation of the map
The map is oriented so that the viewer observes the city and Valley of Mexico from the east. North, therefore, is to the left, south to the right, and west at the top of the map. Mexico City occupies the center of the map, drawn enlarged in relationship to the surrounding lakes and countryside, as befits its importance. All the buildings are drawn with their front facades facing the east, whether or not that was their actual orientation, so that they can be seen as though the viewer were standing in front of them.
Major streets are indicated, such as Tecuba Street. The new cathedral of Mexico City is shown by the central plaza. Other important edifices include the Viceregal Palace, the churches associated with the Augustinian, Dominican, and Franciscan Orders, and Hernán Cortés residence. Each major building had been built utilizing European architecture and is drawn with its characteristic architectural details, such as arches, so that the viewer would have an idea of how it actually appeared.
The lakes and marshes surrounding the city are represented accurately as they appeared in relation to the city; not in scale.
Digitization
The map was digitized and annotated by a team from the University of Art and Design Helsinki and can be accessed online by the public at the project page