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.
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.
Read more about Santa Cruz Map: Orientation of The Map, Digitization, External Links
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