Imagine you’re a 16th-century Spanish colonizer. You’ve just marched into a city that’s been chugging along for more than 3,000 years, casually hosting trade routes, feathered gods, and pyramid construction projects like it's no big deal. People are hauling jaguar pelts and honey from the Gulf and swapping them for polychrome pottery and jadeite from Oaxaca. The gods have names like Tláloc and Quetzalcoatl, and the pyramids rise and vanish into the landscape like slow-motion time-lapse videos. Then you spot a massive hill in the middle of town—overgrown, sunbaked, and suspiciously symmetrical. Obviously, the only logical move is to plop a Catholic church right on top of it.
That’s how the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios ended up exactly where it is today, commanding the highest point in Cholula, Puebla. The church is undeniably beautiful—golden domes, bright tile work, with views that will make you believe in something—but the real story is what lies underneath it. That suspiciously symmetrical hill? Not a hill. It’s a pyramid—the largest in the world by volume—built and rebuilt over the centuries by various waves of Mesoamerican civilizations. The Olmecs had their hands on it. So did the Xicalanca. The Tolteca-Chichimeca came along and left their own layer. Over time it became known as Tlachihualtepetl, or “man-made mountain,” which is the Nahuatl way of saying this thing’s got history.
Early on, it was dedicated to Tláloc, the rain god—a solid choice in a region where the success of your corn harvest basically came down to whether he was in a good mood. But the site wasn’t just used by the locals. Cholula was a major crossroads back then, like some sort of Mesoamerican Grand Central Station.
The markets here buzzed with pochtecas—elite merchants who were also diplomats, spies, and cultural ambassadors—coming from every direction. Coastal traders from Xicalanco on the Campeche coast brought salt, fish, and tropical fruit. And tamemes, human pack animals in all but name, hauled rubber, feathers, jaguar skins—basically anything you could strap to a back. The Plaza de la Concordia, now a tidy civic square, was a riot of languages, textiles, and haggling over prices.
People didn’t just bring their goods—they brought their gods. Religions blended. Ideas were traded alongside obsidian and cacao. And smack in the center of it all was Cholula's pyramid, a sacred site for pilgrims who came to honor Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god, also known as Naxitl, “the Walker.” His relics were said to be housed inside the pyramid, making this a spiritual hub as well as a trade center. So when the Spanish arrived and needed a place to assert themselves religiously and symbolically, they looked at that massive sacred mound and said, yeah, that’ll do nicely.
Construction began in 1594 and was consecrated in 1666. It was dedicated to the Virgin of Los Remedios, a figure the Spanish trotted out during conquest, plague, and general existential panic. The irony is baked right in. A Christian church built directly above a pre-Hispanic temple to one of the most important indigenous deities. A raised Spanish middle finger tiled in gold.
But time has a way of softening things like that. The locals still climb the hill. They still come for the view, the silence, the history. And if you’re standing up there early enough—before the smog rolls in and makes everything look like a faded postcard—you’ll see the volcano Popocatépetl (Popo) puffing politely in the distance. You’ll spot his neighbor, Iztaccíhuatl (Izta), stretched out on her side like a woman taking an eons-long nap. And in the opposite direction stands Cerro Zapotecas (no nickname—sad!) just quietly doing its own thing.
It’s a beautiful spot. And maybe a little heavy, in the best way. Layer upon layer of meaning. Pilgrimage on top of pilgrimage. The sacred reimagined but never erased. The kind of place where history hums under your feet, even if you can’t always hear it. All you have to do is climb a few hundred steps and listen.
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