Cholula

By total volume the Great Pyramid of Cholula is the largest pyramid ever built anywhere, larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, yet most visitors to the site do not immediately recognize it as a pyramid at all. Centuries of erosion, vegetation and, eventually, a church built on its summit have left it looking like an ordinary hill rising out of the town, and its true scale, more than four hundred meters on a side at the base, only becomes clear once a visitor is standing on top of it or sees it mapped against the surrounding streets. That disguise is itself the product of the pyramid's history: rather than one building project, it is the accumulated result of roughly a thousand years of successive peoples building new layers directly over older ones, beginning around the third century BCE and continuing well into the pre-conquest period.

By its final phase the pyramid complex functioned as a major pilgrimage center dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent deity whose cult extended across much of central Mexico, drawing worshippers to Cholula from well beyond the immediate valley. Archaeological evidence suggests the site had already fallen into at least partial disuse by the time of the Spanish arrival in the early sixteenth century, its religious prominence having peaked some centuries earlier, which makes the pyramid as much a monument to an already-fading pilgrimage tradition as to the still-active one the Spanish actually encountered when they reached the city.

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.