A lot of axolotls: the amphibian-themed banknote Mexicans don’t want to spend

Original article by Thomas Graham in Mexico City

For most of her life, Gorda was just an axolotl who lived in a museum in Mexico City – that is, until she became the star of the country’s favourite banknote.

The note, which features a depiction of Gorda as the model for Mexico’s iconic species of salamander, went into circulation in 2021, dazzling the judges of the International Bank Notes Society, who declared it the Note of the Year.

Four years later, the Bank of Mexico has released a report revealing that 12.9 million Mexicans are holding on to this note as if it were worth more than just its value of 50 pesos, or a little under $3. Indeed, millions of them are hoarding more than one.

Only a minority said they would not contemplate spending the notes. Nonetheless, the survey found that roughly $150m worth of them were at least temporarily out of circulation at the time. Some of the first to be printed are even being traded for 100 times their intended value.

All of this is specific to the axolotl banknote: only 12% of those holding on to it said they did the same for other notes. And the reason for most was simple: they liked the design.

Perhaps it is because axolotls are a symbol of something uniquely Mexican.

Axolotls – which are forever tadpoles, never losing their gills to become land dwellers like other salamanders – predate the Aztecs, let alone the Spanish, and once inhabited Lake Texcoco, under the ever-smoking volcano, Popocatépetl.

When the Aztecs arrived in roughly AD1300, they built Tenochtitlan, the seat of their empire, on an island in the middle of the lake – a scene depicted on the flip side of the banknote, based on a mural of the ancient city by the artist Diego Rivera. The Aztecs sometimes snacked on axolotl – but also named them after their god of fire and lightning.

After the Spanish conquered Tenochtitlan, the new rulers drained the lake, restricting axolotls to Xochimilco, on the southern edge of today’s capital – the only place the old waterways endured.

Today, few axolotls survive in the wild. By 2014, their population in Xochimilco had collapsed to just 36 per square kilometre.

Gorda is one of six specimens living in Axolotitlán, the Mexico City museum dedicated to Mexico’s cutest critter.

She is now rather elderly, and rarely put on display in the museum. But the museum’s founder, Pamela Valencia, told El País that it had been worth wheeling her out for the photo shoot for the banknote’s design, if only to bring the public closer to an iconic species at risk of extinction.

“We used to see souvenirs of jaguars and hummingbirds. Today we can see how the axolotl is becoming part of our culture, our everyday lives,” said Valencia. “We cannot save something if we don’t know it exists.”