Lake Xochimilco is an ancient endorheic

Endorheic

An endorheic basin is a closed drainage basin that retains water and allows no outflow to other bodies of water such as rivers or oceans...

 lake located in the Valley of Mexico

Valley of Mexico

The Valley of Mexico is a highlands plateau in central Mexico roughly coterminous with the present-day Distrito Federal and the eastern half of the State of Mexico. Surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico was a centre for several pre-Columbian civilizations, including...

, part of a series of lakes, which included the brackish Lake Texcoco

Lake Texcoco

Lake Texcoco was a natural lake formation within the Valley of Mexico. The Aztecs built the city of Tenochtitlan on an island in the lake. The Spaniards built Mexico City over Tenochtitlan...

, Lake Zumpango, and Lake Xaltocan and the fresh water Lake Chalco

Lake Chalco

Lake Chalco was an endorheic lake formerly located in the Valley of Mexico and was important for human development in central Mexico. The lake was named after the city of Chalco on its eastern shore....

. These lakes were the home of many Mesoamerican cultures, including the Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan – also written Teotihuacán, with a Spanish orthographic accent on the last syllable – is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, just 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the pre-Columbian Americas...

os, the Toltecs, and the Aztecs.

Due to its shallow waters and the freshwater springs that lined the south shore of the lake, Lake Xochimilco was the center of chinampa

Chinampa

Chinampa is a method of ancient Mesoamerican agriculture which used small, rectangle-shaped areas of fertile arable land to grow crops on the shallow lake beds in the Valley of Mexico.-Description:...

 agriculture in the centuries leading up to the Spanish conquest of Mexico

Spanish conquest of Mexico

The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was one of the most important campaigns in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The invasion began in February 1519 and was acclaimed victorious on August 13, 1521, by a coalition army of Spanish conquistadors and Tlaxcalan warriors led by Hernán Cortés...

.