Cholula
Mexico · not visited
Twice the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Spanish thought it was a hill and built a church on it, which is why most of it can never be excavated.
- 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
What is actually there
In the town of San Andrés Cholula, in the Mexican state of Puebla, there is a hill with a church on top. The church is the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, built by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The hill is not a hill.
It is the largest pyramid on earth by volume, roughly twice the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Its Nahuatl name is Tlachihualtepetl, which translates as mountain made by hand. The base measures around 300 by 315 metres and it stands about 66 metres tall, with an estimated volume of roughly 4.45 million cubic metres. Giza is taller and far more famous. Cholula is bigger.
It was built in four major construction phases with at least nine subsequent modifications, beginning around 200 to 300 BCE and continuing for roughly a thousand years, with each phase built over and around the last. The earliest structures show stylistic and ceramic links to Teotihuacan, and Cholula remained closely tied to that city culturally from around 100 BCE to 600 CE.
Why the Spanish did not destroy it
When the Spanish arrived in 1519 the pyramid had already been partly abandoned and overgrown for centuries, and they appear to have taken it for a natural hill. They built a church on the summit, which is exactly what they did to Indigenous sacred sites across Mexico, except that here they did it to the outside of a monument they had not recognised.
That accident is why the structure survives. The church is now 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 dug into the mound, eventually running to around eight kilometres. Only about 800 metres are open to visitors. Of the half-dozen or more superimposed structures, only three have been meaningfully analysed.
What is still open
What is inside the ninety per cent nobody has examined?
Most of the pyramid has never been investigated, and because of the church on top it largely cannot be. Eight kilometres of exploratory tunnel sounds like a lot until you set it against 4.45 million cubic metres of fill. This is the rare case where a major monument's inaccessibility is permanent and legally protected rather than merely difficult.
Who actually started it?
The earliest phase predates Teotihuacan's peak influence. Attribution across the construction sequence involves Teotihuacan-linked groups, later Toltec-associated builders, and after around 1200 CE the Olmeca-Xicalanca and Nahuatl-speaking arrivals. Different phases, different hands, and the sequence is only partly reconstructed.
What do the child burials mean?
Excavation has recovered hundreds of burials from the site, including decapitated remains and the skulls of children, interpreted in the archaeological literature as sacrificial. The specific ritual logic, and how it changed across a thousand years of construction, is reconstructed from fragmentary context.
Why was it abandoned?
Cholula's population dropped sharply in the eighth century, around the same period that Teotihuacan collapsed. Whether the two events are causally linked, and whether the pyramid fell out of use before or after the population decline, is not fully established.
The Nahuatl account of Cholula's origin says a giant named Xelhua survived a great flood by sheltering on a mountain, and afterwards began building a pyramid of adobe brick to reach the sky, until the gods threw down a stone and stopped the work.
Set aside the giant. What is left is a story about a flood, a survivor, and an unfinished tower stopped by divine intervention. That is structurally the same story as Babel, told by people with no contact with Mesopotamia, about a monument that really was built in stages and really did stop growing.
What if the story is not about the origin of the pyramid at all, but a later explanation invented to account for a structure whose real builders had already been forgotten? People standing in front of an enormous unexplained mound will produce a story, and the story they produce tends to involve giants, floods, and someone reaching too high. That pattern is on the Threads page for a reason.
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.
- Published analyses of the pyramid's construction phases and their stylistic links to Teotihuacan.
- UNESCO and Mexican federal heritage designations covering both the pyramid and the colonial church above it.
Not visited in person. Written from published sources. Last reviewed September 2026.