Texcoco, Edo Mex, Mexicopelt:
parque ecologico lago de texcoco
Built: 2019-2025
Design Team: Daniel Holguin, Pedro Camarena, Iñaki Echeverria
PParque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco (PELT) is a landscape of recovery, where water, soil, air, and life are woven back into a living system. Designed by Daniel Holguín, Pedro Camarena, and Iñaki Echeverría under the umbrella of CONAGUA, the project reclaims the ecological intelligence of the former Lake of Texcoco as a foundation for a new metropolitan future.
Parque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco (PELT) is a project of ecological restitution, where water, land, air, and life are reassembled into a living territorial system. Designed by Daniel Holguín, Pedro Camarena, and Iñaki Echeverría under the umbrella of CONAGUA, the park reclaims the dormant intelligence of the former Lake of Texcoco as critical infrastructure for the Valley of Mexico.
Conceived as a sponge park, PELT reconstructs the basin’s original blue–green infrastructure through an interlinked network of wetlands, shallow lagoons, canals, and permeable soils. These systems absorb, store, filter, and release water, transforming flood risk into hydrological resilience while recharging aquifers and moderating extreme climatic conditions. Here, water is not engineered against, but designed with—water is life.
Operating at the scale of the metropolis, the park functions as a vast environmental filter. Vegetation, wetland ecologies, and soil matrices capture PM10 and PM2.5 particles, cool the atmosphere, and regenerate degraded land. The return of migratory and endemic bird species signals the reactivation of ecological cycles; living indicators of environmental recovery.
PELT is also a project of social and environmental justice. For centuries, the Lake of Texcoco structured the economic, cultural, and spatial systems of the pueblos originarios, whose livelihoods were inseparable from its waters. By restoring the lake’s ecological logic, the project re-establishes this relationship, transforming infrastructure into public landscape and ecology into a shared civic resource.
At once technical and poetic, PELT reframes infrastructure as landscape, and landscape as collective memory. It proposes regeneration not as an isolated intervention, but as an evolving territorial process—where water, biodiversity, and community converge to shape a resilient and equitable future.
