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Bernardo de Balbuena is now acclaimed as the first Hispano‐American poet of the New World. Little is known about his early life. It seems he was born in Spain, but taken to America as a child where he was brought up and entered the Church, being ordained as a priest in the 1590s. His major poem about the glories of Mexico was published in 1604. Subsequently he returned to Spain, where he became a doctor of theology in 1606, before travelling back to the New World and taking up senior ecclesiastical positions. He was abbot of Jamaica for approximately 10 years from 1608, and thereafter bishop of Puerto Rico until his death. In the opening passage of Grandeza Mexicana, Balbuena addresses the person (some sources say ‘a lady’, others specify ‘a nun’) to whose request his poem is the answer. His description of the city as being supported on a thin crust over two lagoons is a reference to its being built on the site of the former Aztec capital Technoctitlan, which stood on a lake crossed by causeways. In essence the poem celebrates Mexico City as the crossroads of the world, a site of riches drawn from across the globe: from Europe and Africa across the Atlantic, and from Asia, including from Spanish possessions in the East Indies, across the Pacific. The extracts are taken from Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 5 of Bernardo de Balbuena: Grandeza Mexicana, Madrid: Edición de Asima F. X. Saad Maura; Ediciones Cátedra, 2011, pp. 167–8, 180, 186–9 and 205. The poem was translated by Emma Barker with the assistance of Encarna Trinidad Barrantes.