According to the Anales de Tlatelolco, the earth cracked open in central Mexico on February 19, 1575. The ancient codex, composed around the time the Aztec Empire fell to Spanish conquistadors, features a story of a convulsion that lasted for up to five days, creating landslides and opening up a nearly three-mile-long scar in the ground.

This tale of earth-shattering catastrophe is part of a newly uncovered series of scientifically undocumented earthquakes that took place over the past 450 years in Mexico, seismologists report in a recent issue of the journal Tectonics. Specifically, these rumbles happened along a 620-mile-long stretch of volcanoes known as the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, a region of snowy peaks and fiery eruptions that stretches from the