Cholula is on the outskirts of Puebla and has the world’s largest pyramid, dating from 5 thousand years ago. Some sources have it as the the largest monument ever constructed anywhere in the world. Nowhere near as high as the Giza pyramids, the width is the key dimension.
There’s a sense of a vast scale though the physical pyramid is still hidden and largely unexcavated. You can explore some of the tunnels archaelogists dug 90 years ago which show the successive layers of construction.
Cholula is also the town where where Hernán Cortés massacred 1000s of the local nobility just before he met Moctezuma at Tenochtitlan. When the Spanish later built a church on the top they don’t seem to have realised that the hill was man-made.
-
- The hill is large but most of the construction is still hidden
-
- Ground squirrels are burrowing too
-
- Not the most obvious pyramid in the world
-
- Archaeologists dug tunnels into the pyramid in the 30s to understand the structure
-
- The view from the top
-
- The Spanish built a church on the top
-
- The museum has a model of the pyramid
The classic view of Cholula is the pyramid with Popocatépetl smoking in the background. But there was too much cloud when we were there.
[not my picture)