About
When early in November of 1519 Cortes and his Spaniards struggled through a snowy pass in the pineclad mountains, past the elegant cones of the twin volcanoes Popocatepetl, 'Smoking Mountain', and Iztaccihuatl, 'White Woman', and made their descent into the wide shallow bowl of the Valley of Mexico, they entered a landscape unlike any they had encountered in the New World.