TL;DRWhy This Matters
We tend to think of pyramids as finished monuments — singular expressions of a single ruler's ambition, frozen in stone. Cholula shatters that assumption. This structure was not built once but grown over more than a millennium, layer upon layer, by successive cultures with shifting allegiances and evolving spiritual visions. It is less a building than a geological record of belief, a stratigraphy of devotion that forces us to reconsider how civilizations relate to their sacred landscapes — not as owners, but as custodians adding their chapter to an ongoing story.
The implications extend beyond archaeology. Cholula challenges the Eurocentric hierarchy of monumental architecture that places Giza at the apex. By sheer volume, Tlachihualtepetl is the largest pyramid ever constructed by human hands. Yet it barely registers in the popular imagination. Its relative obscurity raises uncomfortable questions about which civilizations we choose to celebrate, which mysteries we fund, and which stories we allow to define "advanced." When Graham Hancock featured Cholula in his series Ancient Apocalypse, it ignited fresh debate — not just about lost civilizations, but about who gets to interpret the past and on what terms.
Most urgently, Cholula reminds us that sacred sites are living things. The pyramid was never truly abandoned; even during periods of diminished activity, people continued to bury their dead there, to leave offerings, to treat the mound as holy ground. When the Spanish placed a church on top, they were — whether consciously or not — continuing a tradition as old as the structure itself: the impulse to build upward toward the divine, using whatever materials and whatever theology the era provided. In this sense, Cholula is not a ruin. It is a palimpsest of the human spiritual drive, still being written.
The Man-Made Mountain: Scale and Structure
Numbers alone cannot convey the enormity of Tlachihualtepetl, but they are a useful place to start. The pyramid's base measures approximately 450 by 450 meters — nearly half a kilometer on each side. Its total volume has been estimated at roughly 4.45 million cubic meters, compared to about 2.6 million for the Great Pyramid of Giza. While it stands only about 66 meters tall (considerably shorter than Giza's 146 meters), its footprint is so vast that, from a distance, it reads not as architecture but as topography. The Nahuatl name is apt: this is, by any honest reckoning, a mountain made by human hands.
The structure we see today — or rather, the structure we don't see, buried as it is beneath earth and vegetation — is actually a series of nested pyramids. Archaeologists have identified at least four major construction stages and nine or more minor modifications, each representing a distinct cultural moment. The earliest phases date to the Late Formative period, with construction beginning around the 3rd century BCE. The final major expansion appears to have concluded sometime around the 8th or 9th century CE. That means the pyramid was actively being built, rebuilt, and expanded for roughly a thousand years — a span of continuous monumental construction virtually unmatched anywhere on Earth.
What makes this layering especially fascinating is that each new phase did not replace its predecessor but enclosed it. The older structures were carefully sealed and covered, entombed within the growing mass of the new construction. This practice — common in Mesoamerica but startling to those accustomed to European building traditions — suggests a fundamentally different relationship to architecture and time. A building was not a static object but a living entity, periodically renewed through ritual burial and rebirth. The pyramid grew the way a tree grows: by adding rings.
Cultural Crossroads: From Teotihuacan to El Tajín
One of the most striking aspects of Cholula's construction history is its stylistic evolution, which reads like a map of shifting political and cultural allegiances across Mesoamerica. The early phases of the pyramid exhibit clear stylistic affinities with Teotihuacan, the great metropolis to the northwest whose influence radiated across central Mexico during the Classic period. The talud-tablero architectural profile — the distinctive combination of a sloping base panel (talud) and a rectangular framed panel (tablero) — appears in Cholula's earlier layers, suggesting either direct cultural exchange, political subordination, or a shared architectural vocabulary between the two centers.
As Teotihuacan's influence waned — the city itself experienced a dramatic collapse around the 7th century CE — Cholula's later construction phases began reflecting different connections. Influences from the Gulf Coast, particularly from the site of El Tajín in what is now Veracruz, became increasingly evident. This shift is visible in decorative motifs, ceramic styles, and architectural details that point toward a reorientation of trade networks and cultural alliances.
This is not merely an architectural footnote. It speaks to Cholula's remarkable resilience and adaptability. While other Mesoamerican centers rose and fell with the fortunes of a single political order, Cholula endured by absorbing and integrating new influences. The city surrounding the pyramid was one of the longest continuously inhabited settlements in the Americas, and the pyramid itself served as a kind of cultural anchor — a fixed point around which the fluid dynamics of Mesoamerican politics and religion could swirl and settle.
Geoffrey McCafferty, one of the foremost scholars of Cholula's archaeology, has argued for a reinterpretation of the pyramid's significance that moves beyond simple chronological description. In his view, the Great Pyramid was not merely a temple but a political and cosmological statement — a deliberate assertion of Cholula's centrality in the Mesoamerican world. The successive layers of construction can be read as successive claims to legitimacy, each new culture wrapping its authority around the sacred core of its predecessors.
The Feathered Serpent and the Giant Who Built a Mountain
No account of Cholula is complete without its mythology, which is as layered and complex as the pyramid itself. The structure was dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent deity who occupied a position of supreme importance across multiple Mesoamerican cultures. Quetzalcoatl was not merely a god but a civilizing principle — associated with wind, learning, agriculture, the morning star, and the very breath of life. That Cholula was his primary cult center in the Postclassic period tells us something about the pyramid's perceived cosmic significance: this was not just a large building but the earthly seat of one of Mesoamerica's most powerful divine forces.
The mythological traditions surrounding the pyramid's construction are equally revealing. One prominent legend attributes the building of Tlachihualtepetl to Xelhua, a giant who survived a great flood and attempted to construct an enormous mound to reach the heavens. According to the story, the gods grew angry at this act of hubris and hurled fire upon the builders, halting the construction. The parallels to the biblical Tower of Babel are striking and have not gone unnoticed by scholars — though whether these parallels reflect genuine cross-cultural archetypes, post-conquest contamination of indigenous narratives by Christian missionaries, or something else entirely remains a matter of debate.
The Aztecs, who came to dominate central Mexico in the centuries before Spanish contact, had their own traditions about Cholula. They attributed its construction to giants fleeing a great deluge — a narrative that fits within the broader Mesoamerican cosmological framework of successive world ages, each ending in cataclysm. These flood narratives, found in cultures around the world, raise perennial questions about shared human memory, independent invention, and the possibility of real catastrophic events encoded in myth.
What is clear is that the mythology and the architecture were never separate domains. The pyramid was the myth made physical — a man-made mountain that enacted, in stone and earth, the cosmic drama of ascent, destruction, and renewal. To build upon it was to participate in that drama. To worship within it was to enter the story.
Beneath the Surface: Eight Kilometers of Tunnels
The modern archaeological exploration of Cholula began in 1931, when the Mexican architect Ignacio Marquina initiated a systematic tunneling program into the pyramid's interior. What followed over the subsequent decades was one of the most extraordinary subterranean investigations in the history of archaeology. Approximately eight kilometers of tunnels were excavated through the structure, revealing a hidden world of altars, staircases, painted murals, and architectural features that had been sealed away for centuries.
Among the most significant discoveries was the "Patio of the Altars" (Patio de los Altares), a ceremonial space on the pyramid's south side that provides crucial evidence of the ritual practices that animated the site. The patio contains several carved stone altars and stelae, some decorated with elaborate reliefs depicting serpents and other iconographic elements associated with Quetzalcoatl and the broader Mesoamerican symbolic repertoire. Burials found in and around the patio — including post-Classic interments — demonstrate that the site continued to function as sacred ground long after the pyramid's major construction phases had ended.
The murals discovered within the tunnels are particularly significant. Known collectively as the "Bebedores" (Drinkers) murals, they depict scenes of ritual drinking — possibly of pulque, the fermented agave beverage central to Mesoamerican ceremonial life. These vivid, polychrome paintings offer a rare window into the social and religious practices of Cholula's inhabitants, suggesting that the pyramid was not merely a place of solemn worship but a setting for communal celebration and ritual intoxication — activities that, in Mesoamerican thought, facilitated communication with the divine.
Archaeological work has continued into the present century. In 2023, researcher Mark Milligan reported new discoveries at the Great Pyramid, adding to our understanding of its construction sequence and the activities that took place within and around it. Each new finding underscores how much of the pyramid remains unexplored. The eight kilometers of tunnels, impressive as they are, represent only a fraction of the total volume. The vast majority of Tlachihualtepetl has never been excavated — and may never be, given the presence of the colonial church on its summit and the modern city surrounding its base.
This is one of the great paradoxes of Cholula: the largest pyramid in the world is also one of the least explored. The very conditions that preserved it — its burial beneath earth and vegetation, the construction of a church and a city atop and around it — are also the conditions that prevent its full investigation. What else lies inside? What murals, what tombs, what artifacts remain sealed within those millions of cubic meters of earth and stone? We simply do not know.
The Church on the Mountain: Conquest and Continuity
The arrival of the Spanish in the early sixteenth century brought catastrophic change to Cholula and its inhabitants. In October 1519, Hernán Cortés and his forces perpetrated a massacre in Cholula that killed thousands — an act of strategic terror designed to intimidate the surrounding populations into submission. The city, which had been one of the most important pilgrimage centers in Mesoamerica, was devastated.
In the decades that followed, the colonial project of spiritual conquest took physical form. The Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (Church of Our Lady of Remedies) was constructed atop the Great Pyramid — though the precise date and circumstances of its founding are debated, with most accounts placing it in the late sixteenth century, around 1594. The placement was almost certainly deliberate: the construction of Christian churches on top of indigenous sacred sites was a widespread practice throughout colonial Latin America, intended to symbolize the triumph of Christianity over pagan religion and to redirect existing patterns of pilgrimage and worship toward the new faith.
And yet, the act of building a church on top of the pyramid inadvertently continued the very tradition it sought to erase. For a thousand years, successive cultures had built upon the sacred mound, each new layer claiming the spiritual authority of what came before. The Spanish church was, in a sense, simply the latest construction phase — another group wrapping its theology around the ancient core. Whether the colonizers recognized this irony is doubtful. But the indigenous populations of Cholula may well have understood it intuitively. The mountain endured. The names of the gods changed. The impulse to ascend did not.
Today, the church remains one of the most photographed landmarks in Puebla, its yellow-and-white facade gleaming against the backdrop of the snow-capped volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. For many visitors, the juxtaposition is the point — the visible embodiment of Mexico's complex, often painful, always syncretic cultural history. The colonial church does not cancel the pyramid beneath it. The pyramid does not invalidate the centuries of Catholic devotion above. They coexist, uneasily, beautifully, as layers of the same human story.
The Cholula Debate: Mainstream and Fringe
The Great Pyramid of Cholula has become a flashpoint in broader debates about how we interpret the ancient past. When Graham Hancock featured the site in episode 2 of his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, he used it to advance his longstanding argument that an advanced, now-lost civilization may have seeded the architectural and astronomical knowledge found in monumental sites around the world. Cholula's immense scale and its flood mythology provided, in Hancock's telling, circumstantial evidence for this hypothesis.
The archaeological community has pushed back firmly. Kayleigh, a historian and content creator, produced a detailed critique of the episode, challenging what she described as Hancock's selective use of evidence, questionable measurements, and mischaracterization of professional archaeologists. Her central argument — shared by most mainstream scholars — is that the similarities between pyramids worldwide (in Egypt, Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, and Southeast Asia) are better explained by convergent cultural evolution: independent societies arriving at similar architectural solutions in response to similar challenges (building tall, stable structures with available materials) and similar astronomical observations.
Both perspectives deserve honest engagement. The mainstream view has the weight of accumulated evidence behind it. The construction chronology of Cholula is well-documented through stratigraphy, ceramic analysis, and radiocarbon dating. There is no archaeological evidence at the site of technologies or knowledge systems that cannot be accounted for within the known framework of Mesoamerican cultural development. The pyramid's evolution from a modest Late Formative platform to a colossal multi-phase structure is entirely consistent with gradual, indigenous innovation.
The fringe perspective, while lacking direct evidence, asks questions that are not inherently unreasonable. Why do flood myths appear in such varied cultures? Why do pyramid forms recur across unconnected civilizations? What might we be missing in our understanding of the deep past, given that sea levels rose dramatically at the end of the last Ice Age, potentially submerging coastal settlements that could have held crucial evidence?
The most intellectually honest position may be one of measured openness: the evidence at Cholula supports a narrative of indigenous Mesoamerican achievement, full stop. But the broader questions about cultural transmission, shared mythological motifs, and the incompleteness of the archaeological record remain legitimate avenues of inquiry — so long as they are pursued with rigor rather than wishful thinking.
A Living Monument: Cholula Today
To visit Cholula today is to experience something that no photograph or documentary can fully convey: the sheer presence of the structure. The pyramid does not announce itself the way Giza does, with geometric precision cutting against the desert sky. Instead, it reveals itself gradually — a hill that is too regular, too symmetrical, too intentional to be natural. The realization dawns slowly: the entire landscape is architecture.
Visitors can enter the excavated tunnel system, walking through narrow passages carved through the pyramid's successive layers. The experience is visceral — the weight of millions of tons of earth and stone pressing in from all sides, the cool air carrying the faint mineral scent of deep time. Emerging from the tunnels into the Patio of the Altars, with its carved stelae and open sky, feels like surfacing from a dream.
The ascent to the summit church offers a different kind of revelation. From the top, the modern city of San Pedro Cholula spreads in every direction, its grid of streets and churches (the city famously has a church for every day of the year, according to local legend) testifying to the layered religious history of the place. On clear days, the volcanic peaks of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl frame the horizon — the same peaks that would have been visible to the pyramid's original builders, the same peaks that feature in their own cycle of myths about love, loss, and transformation.
The site is managed as both an archaeological zone and a living community space. Festivals, markets, and religious celebrations continue to take place in its shadow. The pyramid has not been "restored" in the way that many Mesoamerican sites have — its earthen covering remains largely intact, a deliberate choice that preserves the site's integrity but also means that the full scale of the architecture remains hidden. Whether this is a form of protection or a form of neglect depends on one's perspective. What is certain is that the pyramid endures, as it has for more than two thousand years, absorbing the life of each new era into its mass.
The Questions That Remain
Cholula asks us to sit with uncertainty — and to find that uncertainty exhilarating rather than threatening. The largest pyramid on Earth remains mostly unexcavated. Its earliest construction phases are still poorly understood. The precise nature of its relationship to Teotihuacan — was Cholula a satellite, a rival, an ally? — remains contested. The full extent of its tunnel system has never been mapped. And the question of what lies sealed within its unexplored core continues to tantalize.
Beyond the specifics of the site, Cholula poses deeper questions about how civilizations remember and are remembered. Why does a structure larger than Giza command a fraction of its fame? What does our selective attention reveal about the unconscious hierarchies that shape our understanding of the past? If the pyramid were in Egypt or Europe, would it have been fully excavated a century ago?
There is also the question of continuity. The people of Cholula did not stop being the people of Cholula when the Spanish arrived. The indigenous communities of the Puebla region carry living traditions, languages, and cosmological frameworks that connect them — however tenuously, however transformed — to the builders of Tlachihualtepetl. Their relationship to the pyramid is not merely historical but present. Any honest accounting of the site must reckon with this fact: that the man-made mountain is not a dead monument to a vanished civilization but a living landmark in an ongoing story.
Perhaps the most provocative question Cholula raises is about the nature of monuments themselves. We tend to think of great buildings as expressions of permanence — attempts to defy time. But Tlachihualtepetl suggests a different philosophy. Its builders did not seek to create a single, perfect, eternal structure. They created a process — a practice of building upon building, layer upon layer, generation upon generation. The monument was not the finished product but the act of building itself. In this light, the church on the summit is not an imposition but an inheritance. And the question is not what the pyramid was, but what it is still becoming.