A Church Built Directly on the Temple It Replaced

In October 1519, on his march toward Tenochtitlan, Hernan Cortes and his Tlaxcalan allies killed a large number of Cholula's inhabitants in an episode Spanish accounts framed as preempting an ambush and indigenous accounts remember very differently; the city's temples were destroyed in the aftermath. Rather than abandon the pyramid site or clear it entirely, Cholula's Franciscan missionaries chose in the 1570s to build a Catholic church directly on the pyramid's summit platform, the same elevated position the pre-conquest temple to Quetzalcoatl had occupied, a placement too deliberate to read as coincidence given how thoroughly religious authority in Mesoamerica had always been tied to controlling the highest point in a settlement.

The present church, Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, is not the first building raised on that spot; it replaced earlier, smaller structures across the following centuries as the parish grew. What has remained constant is the underlying gesture: a Catholic sanctuary sitting on top of, rather than beside or instead of, one of the largest indigenous religious monuments ever built. Scholars of Mesoamerican religion regularly point to Cholula as one of the clearest and most literal physical examples anywhere in the Americas of colonial-era religious superimposition, a single hill carrying two full religious histories stacked one on top of the other.