Cholula
Mexico · not visited
A pyramid of roughly 4.45 million cubic metres, with a Spanish church on top. By the time the Spanish came it had been abandoned, with a rain-god shrine on its summit, and it still looks like a hill.
- Latitude
- 19.0579° N
- Longitude
- 98.3022° W
- Volume
- c. 4.45 million m³
- Built
- c. 300 BCE to 700 CE
- Open questions
- 4 logged
A shrine replaced by a church
In the colonial period, a shrine to a rain deity stood on the summit of what the Spanish took for a hill. By then the pyramid beneath it had been abandoned for a long time, and the colonial sources discuss it under mountain worship. The Spanish replaced the shrine with a church, the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, which is still there. The hill is not a hill.
It is the largest pyramid on earth by volume.
Its Nahuatl name, Tlachihualtepetl, is usually translated as mountain made by hand. The base is usually given as about 300 by 315 metres, the height about 66 metres, and the volume roughly 4.45 million cubic metres, against something like 2.6 million for the Great Pyramid at Giza. Giza is taller and far more famous. Cholula is bigger.
It was built in several major phases over roughly a thousand years, beginning around 200 to 300 BCE, with each phase built over and around the last. The earliest structures show stylistic and ceramic links to Teotihuacán.
The accident that preserved it
The church is a protected historic monument in its own right, which means the pyramid beneath it can never be fully excavated. Systematic investigation began in 1931 with tunnels driven into the mound, usually given as around eight kilometres in total, of which only about 800 metres are open to visitors.
Who built it, according to whom
The colonial-era accounts disagree. The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca places the Olmeca-Xicalanca, a people with dual rulership, at the Great Pyramid when the Tolteca-Chichimeca defeated them. Ixtlilxochitl credits the Olmeca-Uixtotin with building it for their god Ehecatl, after conquering the quinametin, the giants. These are late chronicles of the winners and the displaced, written long after the pyramid's first phase, which is far older than any of the peoples named.
The giants and the tower
The tale that gives Cholula its Babel reputation is first recorded in the sixteenth century. Pedro de los Ríos, writing before 1565, tells how the giant Xelhua built a pyramid at Cholula and the gods destroyed it with fire. Diego Durán, a Dominican, gives a version in which giants build a tower to reach the sky and are destroyed by the Lord of the Heavens. In the eighteenth century Lorenzo Boturini claimed an Aztec painting showed Cholula built as a counterfeit of the Tower of Babel, and other eighteenth-century writers found no evidence for such claims before contact.
Jason Colavito, in a secondary discussion, argues that Durán's traditions were already contaminated for nearly a century with Christian stories, that many of his informants were converted, and that comparing Durán with Ríos suggests the story drifted toward the biblical one over time. I have not read the primary texts, so this rests on his account of them.
Set the giants aside. What is left is a story about people who built a tower toward the sky and were stopped by the gods. That is structurally the same story as Babel, and the first question is whether it is the same story because of contact, or because of something in how people explain a vast, unexplained structure. What if the legend is not about the origin of the pyramid at all, but a later explanation for a mound whose real builders had been forgotten?
Why it is worth asking: because a pyramid this large, abandoned and overgrown, is exactly the kind of thing that invites an origin story, and the pattern of giants, floods and presumption recurs across cultures. What supports an independent origin: the Mesoamerican giants, the quinametin, appear in other chronicles and have their own role. What speaks against it: the earliest recorded version dates from the 1500s, after decades of missionary teaching, and the story moves closer to Genesis in the later retelling. What would tell the readings apart: a pre-Hispanic source, such as a painted codex, for the tower story. None has been identified. What stays unknown is whether any of it goes back to the people who first built the mound.
What is still open
What is inside the pyramid?
Most of it has never been investigated, and because of the church on top it largely cannot be. Eight kilometres of tunnel sounds like a lot until you set it against 4.45 million cubic metres of fill. Non-invasive imaging, of the kind used on other pyramids, is the obvious route, and I have not seen it published for Cholula.
Which people built which phase?
The earliest phase shows links to Teotihuacán. The later chronicles name the Olmeca-Xicalanca and the Olmeca-Uixtotin. Those accounts and the archaeological sequence have not been reconciled, and the construction sequence is only partly reconstructed. A secure date for each phase is the starting point.
Does the tower story preserve anything pre-Hispanic?
Possibly, and possibly not. The test is whether any source predating the missionaries carries it. Until one does, the safest reading is that it is a colonial-period synthesis.
When, and why, did the pyramid stop being used?
By the colonial period it was abandoned, with a shrine on top. How the last phase of use ended, and whether the pyramid fell out of use before or after changes in the city around it, is not fully established. Dating the last renovations against the history of Cholula's population would help.
Sources
- INAH, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, excavation and tunnel survey records for the Great Pyramid of Cholula.
- Bandelier, A., nineteenth-century survey work at Cholula that preceded the 1931 excavations.
- McCafferty, G., University of Calgary, overview of Cholula (2008), for the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, Ixtlilxochitl, and the colonial shrine on the summit.
- Colavito, J., “Was Mexico’s Pyramid of Cholula Related to the Biblical Tower of Babel?”, a secondary discussion of Pedro de los Ríos, Diego Durán and Boturini. I have not read the primary texts.
- Published analyses of the pyramid’s construction phases and their stylistic links to Teotihuacán. Volume, dimensions and tunnel lengths are the figures usually given; I could not trace them to one survey.
Not visited in person. Written from published sources. Last reviewed 12 October 2026.