Mexico Pictures
Photos

Offering small group vacations in Latin America, Footloose tours of Mexico are friendly, efficient and comfortable.

Footloose Mexican Tours:
Brochure | Mexico and Guatemala
Yucatan Highlights | Mexico Tour

Click the image on the right to enter the 17 page Mexico Pictures gallery or go below for other photos or information:

Mexico Travel Guide | Mexico Map | Mexico Beaches

Chichen Itza Pictures | Oaxaca Photos

Merida Photos | Mexico City Pictures

Uxmal Images | Mexican Tours

Mexico Photos © Julian Loader

A little Mexican history:

The Toltecs built the monstrous pyramids of Teotihuacan just outside what is now Mexico City but did not conduct human sacrifices and mysteriously disappeared well before the Aztecs arrived.
The Maya were another tribe in the south [now known as the Yucatan Peninsula and Guatemala] dominated by the Aztecs that believed [or perhaps agreed on penalty of death?] that human sacrifice was necessary. The Maya built the clever, beautiful pyramids and other structures of Chichen-Itza and Tikal [Guatemala].

A restaurant balcony in Oaxaca, Mexico, during the Days of the Dead festival.

Montezuma [known as 'Reverend Speaker' Motecuzoma to the Aztec people] was a weak and indecisive ruler who was mostly responsible for the fall of the Aztec empire to the courageous but low-ranking Spanish captain Cortez - who had no permission whatsoever to invade the country; he was actually sent to explore the coastline on behalf of the [Spanish] governor of Cuba. The two other factors that aided the collapse of the Aztecs were alliances made by the invaders with two or three powerful but subservient rival tribes and the rampant diseases brought by the few hundred Spanish soldiers, who were initially made reasonably welcome in spite of their disgustingly dirty habits [the Aztecs bathed at least once a day, the Spanish once a year for some, once in a lifetime for many - at birth].
Montezuma gave Cortez literally tons of glorious and solid gold artifacts [which were immediately melted down for shipment to Spain] while Cortez and his merry men gave local people smallpox, the plague, measles, mumps and influenza, which killed off about one third of the entire population and severely weakened the rest. Still, Cortez was a brave and intelligent commander who took on an entire warrior world of hundreds of thousands with a force of barely two thousand - after reinforcements arrived.