Cooking Class & Xochimilco Floating Gardens

Learn to prepare a traditional Mexican dish in a local kitchen at the house of Doña Lupita. She will take you to a typical Mexican market to buy all the ingredients — there are three menu options which you can choose from.

You spend the morning tasting and preparing the meal to enjoy it afterwards on a colorfully painted traditional trajinera boat in the canals of Xochimilco with Mariachi entertainment.

Xochimilco is a large system of canals based on the original make up of the city of Tenochtitlan as Mexico City was called before the arrival of the Spanish. When the first nomadic settlers arrived in the Valley of Mexico, they found an enormous lake. As the years went by and their population grew, the land could no longer satisfy their agricultural needs. They solved the problem by devising a system of chinampas (floating gardens), rectangular structures akin to barges, which they filled with reeds, branches and mud. They planted the barges with willows, whose roots anchored the floating gardens to the lake bed, making a labyrinth of small islands and canals on which vendors carried flowers and produce grown on the chinampas to market. Today Xochimilco is the only place in Mexico where the gardens still exist.