This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mexico gathers two cities where a Mesoamerican religious capital met the conquest that followed it, one a pilgrimage pyramid built over across a thousand years, the other an island capital built over in a single generation.
Cholula, in the modern state of Puebla, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the Americas, built around the Great Pyramid of Cholula, Tlachihualtepetl, larger by volume than Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza though far lower and now overgrown enough to resemble a hill. Successive peoples enlarged it in layers over roughly a thousand years, and in its final pre conquest phase it served as a pilgrimage center for Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. After Hernan Cortes's forces killed a large number of Cholulans in 1519 and destroyed the city's temples, Spanish Franciscans built a church on the pyramid's summit; the present Nuestra Senora de los Remedios stands directly atop the ancient temple platform, a literal superimposition often cited as one of the clearest physical examples of religious syncretism anywhere in the Americas.
Tenochtitlan was the Mexica capital, founded on an island in Lake Texcoco and organized around the Templo Mayor, a twin pyramid carrying shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc that the Mexica understood as the center of the world. Its ritual calendar, priesthood and sacrifices were the apparatus of the state, and the city fell to Cortes and his Indigenous allies in 1521. Mexico City was built over it, and systematic excavation of the Templo Mayor beneath the modern center began only in 1978.
One capital was buried gradually under an accumulating pyramid, the other overnight under a new city, and both now carry a church or a museum where the old center of the world once stood.