Cholula

The Nahua name for the pyramid is Tlachihualtepetl, the hand-made or constructed mountain, and the name is literal. Builders raised it in at least four main phases between roughly the third century BCE and the ninth century CE, each generation casing the older temple inside a larger one, like nesting shells. The finished mass runs to about 4.45 million cubic metres, more than one and a half times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza, though it stands lower and much broader.

It was made mostly of adobe, sun-dried mud brick, rather than cut stone. Once it was abandoned, the earth and vegetation that gathered over it turned the whole structure into what reads today as a natural hill.

By tradition the pyramid was dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. Cholula was one of the oldest and most important religious centers in Mesoamerica, occupied continuously from around 500 BCE and, for long stretches, a rival to Teotihuacan.

It drew pilgrims from far beyond the valley. Accounts hold that the two high priests of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl confirmed the legitimacy of rulers who came from other kingdoms, which gave the city unusual authority across the eastern Nahua world.

Hernan Cortes reached Cholula in October 1519 on his march to the Aztec capital. Warned, by his own account, of an ambush, he and his Tlaxcalan allies turned on the city and killed thousands of largely unarmed people in the sacred precinct within a few hours. Spanish sources put the dead at around six thousand.

The massacre broke Cholula as an independent power, and it is still commemorated and argued over in the city today.

Rather than tear the pyramid down, the Spanish built on top of it. The church of Nuestra Senora de los Remedios rose on the summit in the late sixteenth century, replacing the shrine that had stood there. Earthquakes have damaged and reshaped it over the centuries, and much of what stands now is a later rebuild.

Because worship shifted from the old temple to the church without a break, the site is often described as the oldest continuously used place of worship in the Americas. Every September, during the feast of the Virgin of Los Remedios, pilgrims climb to the summit and sing Las Mananitas to her at dawn.

Most of the pyramid is still inside the hill. Archaeologists tunneled about eight kilometres through its core from 1931 onward, and roughly eight hundred metres of those passages are open, narrow and lit, running past the buried stairways of earlier temples.

From the church terrace on a clear day you can see the Popocatepetl volcano to the west, often trailing steam. The climb is short, and the view takes in the town, its many church domes, and the plain the city once commanded.