The Pyramid Bigger Than Egypt's, Disguised as a Hill

By total volume the Great Pyramid of Cholula is the largest pyramid ever built anywhere, larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, yet most visitors to the site do not immediately recognize it as a pyramid at all. Centuries of erosion, vegetation and, eventually, a church built on its summit have left it looking like an ordinary hill rising out of the town, and its true scale, more than four hundred meters on a side at the base, only becomes clear once a visitor is standing on top of it or sees it mapped against the surrounding streets. That disguise is itself the product of the pyramid's history: rather than one building project, it is the accumulated result of roughly a thousand years of successive peoples building new layers directly over older ones, beginning around the third century BCE and continuing well into the pre-conquest period.

By its final phase the pyramid complex functioned as a major pilgrimage center dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent deity whose cult extended across much of central Mexico, drawing worshippers to Cholula from well beyond the immediate valley. Archaeological evidence suggests the site had already fallen into at least partial disuse by the time of the Spanish arrival in the early sixteenth century, its religious prominence having peaked some centuries earlier, which makes the pyramid as much a monument to an already-fading pilgrimage tradition as to the still-active one the Spanish actually encountered when they reached the city.