Mexican cuisine is known for its intense and varied flavors, colorful decoration, and its variety of spices. Mexican gastronomy, in terms of diversity of appealing tastes and textures, is one of the richest in the world in proteins, vitamins, and minerals, though it is characterized by some as excessively spicy.
When Spanish conquistadores arrived in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (the ancient city on which Mexico City was built), they found that the people's diet consisted largely of corn-based dishes with chilis and herbs, usually complemented with beans and squash. The conquistadores eventually combined their imported diet of rice, beef, pork, chicken, wine, garlic and onions with the indigenous foods of pre-Columbian Mexico, including chocolate, maize, tomato, vanilla, avocado, papaya, pineapple, chile pepper, beans, squash, sweet potato, peanut and turkey. The totopo (a salted corn tortilla cooked in a fire oven) may have been created as part of this cuisine.
