Celebrated 3 times a year.
Much of Mexico was under Aztec rulership for about 100 years up until the time when the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez and his soldiers invaded the territory in 1521. Cortez and his men observed various festivals held in honour of the god of rain and lightning, Tlaloc.
The Aztecs celebrated the first rain festival at the beginning of the agricultural year in February, in the course of which a priest or shaman carried out a number of rituals to encourage rain-fall .
The second rain festival was offered to Tlaloc and other rain gods in March, once flowers had begun to bloom, as these signified the arrivals of the first new life from the earth.
A third Aztec rain festival was celebrated in autumn in order to encourage rain-fall. At the third rain festival, Aztec people formed shapes of small mountains and images of the god, Tlaloc, as he was thought to live in a high mountain.
As superstitious modern folklore has it, during the Olympic Games in Mexico City in 1968, it poured with rain, because of a certain act of some students who created a statue of Tlaloc and sat on its top. Legend has it that Tlaloc did not quite approve of this and the sky came down during the Olympic Games held in the city that year.
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