Cholula: The Largest Pyramid on Earth

I'm here today at the Santuario de la Virgen de los Remedios in Cholula, in Puebla, in Mexico. Behind me there is a richly adorned Catholic church that was built in the colonial era. So the church originally dates back to the 1600s. It was destroyed in an earthquake in the 1800s. It was rebuilt. It was very finely decorated. And all this time, the people who built the church had no idea what they were sitting on top of. It was thought for the longest time that this was just a hill. But this is not a hill. This is a pyramid. And it's not only a pyramid, but it's the largest pyramid on the planet Earth. It's not the tallest by height, but it's the largest by mass. So this pyramid is about twice the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, if you weigh all the stones that went into it. And it wasn't until the 20th century that they realized there was even a pyramid here at all. They had to update the church a little bit to reflect this. And today it's visited not only as a church, even though there are still religious pilgrims who come here to pray, it's also visited as an archaeological site. So join me today here on Pyramid Review and I will tell you all about Tlachihualtepec, better known as the Pyramid of Cholula. One fun fact about this pyramid already is that it has gift shops on top and it has a bathroom with running water. And I don't think there's any other pyramid in the world that has those things directly built on top of the pyramid. So that's somewhat unique. I do know that in Palenque, in Chiapas, there was the castle of Lord Pakal, the palace of Lord Pakal. It had running water and I think even flushing toilets. But that was in ancient times. They don't work anymore. But this one works. There's a great view from up here. Cholula is said to be one of the oldest, longest inhabited cities in America with people living here for two and a half thousand years at least, continuously. But you can see that all of this stuff is a pyramid and there are even ruins still in some places like right there. Let's get to the bottom of this pyramid. This pyramid is so big that it's practically a park. There are lots of people that are jogging on top of it. This path is made of very fine stones. That's malachite. There you can see stairs from different times of construction of the pyramid. Here you can see there is a gutter that was on the outside of the pyramid at some point. All right, now I'm at the bottom and as you can see behind me it's starting to look more pyramid-like. Here you can sort of sense the scale of this place. It's absolutely enormous and even though it's not that tall, it is very wide. It has a lot of these structures at the bottom that sort of stick out of the sides. So this is roughly the timeline of events here. Around 7,000 years ago, maybe a two-hour drive from here in the Tehuacan Valley, that's when maize was first domesticated. Corn. And they found some human remains in the neighboring city of Puebla, which is very close to this pyramid. You can see it from the top. Puebla's over there. Those remains are in the Museo Casa del Mandrugo in the center of Puebla. They are three and a half thousand years old. And the people that these remains are from were in their 40s and 50s, so that was quite old for that time. And it shows that already three and a half thousand years ago people were thriving here. They were settled. They lived long lives. They practiced agriculture. Then this pyramid itself comes from two and a half thousand years ago. So this pyramid was studied very extensively. They dug tunnels, exploratory tunnels, inside to see what was inside and to uncover the different layers. There's something like eight kilometers of tunnels. That's miles and miles of tunnels that go through this thing that were dug by archaeologists through the different layers, through the fill, to see what was inside. The oldest thing that they found was a little bit more than 2,500 years old. They could carbon date everything and then also architectural styles and artifacts give an idea of what the other layers were since then. So what they came up with was it was first settled around 2,500 years ago. That's when the first innermost structure was built here. Then on top of that there are many different layers. Here you can see there's an outer layer that was built later and inside there's another layer that was built previous to that. This inner layer is from around the time of Teotihuacan and it has the typical Talud and Tablero architectural style. You can see there's some other bits of it over there and in various other places here. You can see that this is the layer of the ground as it used to be and all this has this dirt that accumulated on top. Much of it probably eroded from the pyramid itself. You can see that this was a massive structure and it would have had many staircases and ceremonial platforms as well as monuments and other things. So most of this was built actually a very long time ago. It was started 2,500 years ago and construction on it took place mostly around 2,000 years ago and then for a couple hundred years after that. Around the same time as Teotihuacan near Mexico City, which is also quite close to here, there it seems that this was a temple to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. In the regional museum of Puebla there's a very large sculpture of the feathered serpent that was, I think, taken from this pyramid and by the time of around 500 AD it seems that construction largely stopped and the society that built this started to decline just like in Teotihuacan. All of this probably would have been richly colorfully painted at some point. Unfortunately all of that is gone. There are two of these. They look kind of like picture frames. These could have been monuments that had paint on them before or they could have been ceremonial doorways perhaps to the underworld or something. Here we have a nice rather unique sort of design made out of the bricks of the pyramid and over here you can see these are some feathered serpent images. Quetzalcoatl on this side as well. There's a couple more images of the snake. I don't know if you can see but there's that same pattern over there carved into the stones covered in stucco and you can see more layers of pyramid in front of it with some Tolud and Tablero over there. There's a tunnel that goes into the pyramid. More stucco. Here we see a totally different style of construction with totally different stones. There's more tunnels and somewhere in there there's a large mural that was found. Probably there are many more still inside. Over here is a replica of the mural. I'll go show it to you. You can see some figures in there. Looks like they're drinking something. They all have cups and bowls. It doesn't seem that there is any writing on it. Here's another version of the mural inside the museum and also there's an inner pyramid that is covered with these sorts of murals. Quetzalcoatl. Since I'm talking about the museum I should say that it's worth a visit. It's filled with all sorts of artifacts that were found when they were uncovering the pyramids and digging the tunnels. So if you want to see some objects from the people who lived at Cholula, this is the place to go. The museum also used to be the entrance to the tunnels when they were still publicly accessible but they've been closed since the pandemic. So even though there are all these many layers of construction, pretty much all of this was built before the year 500 AD. Around 2,000 years ago. 1,500 years ago. And then construction largely stopped. The civilization that was living here faded into obscurity and new people moved in. Around 600 or 700 some new people moved in. They were called the Olmeca Xicayanca. They came from the region of Tabasco. They're not the same as the Olmecs who made the big heads. This is roughly like a thousand years after that happened. But they came from the same area and they came and they lived here and they had a ruler, a lord, who lived on top of the pyramid and his name was Aguayanch Amapane. This also looks like some different architectural styles of different time periods. You can see a doorway there. It looks like an original entrance into the pyramid because the lintel is built into the wall there. There's a nice little altar stone that's in front of the offerings. They did find some bones of children here that they think may have been sacrificed at some point to the rain god Tlaloc. But it's a pyramid of Quetzalcoatl, you say. Well, actually it was a temple to Quetzalcoatl, then it was the house of Aguayanch Amapane, and then it was largely abandoned after that. The Toltecs came around the year 1000. The Toltecs were big fans of pyramids and of Quetzalcoatl, but they didn't like this pyramid that was built as a pyramid to Quetzalcoatl, probably because they associated it with the old regime. They had their own religion. They built their own new temples elsewhere in the city of Cholula, and religious life sort of shifted over there, and this one fell into disrepair, ruin, and abandonment. There's another side of it. As you can see, most of the pyramid is unactivated. There's just some little bits here and there that they've dug out because it's enormous. They can't reconstruct everything. But around the year 1000, the Toltecs came. They took over. They set up their new their new temple. This one fell into disrepair. The Toltec empire collapsed. Later on, the Aztecs came, and the Aztecs, they liked this pyramid. They used it, but they associated it with the In mythology, water, rain, flowing water is associated with mountains. And in Nahuatl, this pyramid received the name Clachi Hualtepetl, which means the constructed mountain, the built mountain. I made it to the top. Okay, I made it to the top. It's very windy up here. You can see the town pretty well. This is already just a huge structure, but this is a small little staircase on the side of the pyramid. I don't think I'm even halfway to the top. So, the Aztecs were the last indigenous people to occupy and use this site, and then the Catholics came along and they built their church on top. But by the time the Spanish got here, it had already been pretty much abandoned and overgrown for hundreds of years. So, when they built the church, they didn't know that it was a pyramid. They assumed it was just a hill. But, in the local language, the lore was preserved that it was Clachi Hualtepetl, the artificial mountain. Going down is always worse because somehow you never see the stairs until you're at the very edge, and by then you have a horrible vertigo and fear of heights going on. Interesting rounded structure over here. Looks like a later edition that was put on top of this structure. And here is another tunnel. After I left the pyramid, I stopped at a coffee cart and bought a refreshing cup of coffee from a friendly man named Mike, who knew a lot about the local history. Mike drew me a mysterious map, which I'll explain in a second. But first, let me tell you about my next stop, the Convento San Gabriel. This used to be the site of a pyramid as well. This was the site of the Aztec temple to Quetzalcoatl at the time of the Spanish conquest, and in 1519, on his way to conquer the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan, or Mexico City, Hernán Cortés stopped here to pay the Cholulans a visit. It did not go well at all for the Cholulans, according to the account of Hernán Cortés himself, 3,000 perished as a result of that encounter, while another witness puts the number at 30,000. Modern historians estimate that around 6,000 were lost in what came to be known as the Cholula Massacre, one of the grisliest episodes from the history of the conquest. After the Spanish defeated the Aztec empire and took control, the temple to Quetzalcoatl was rebuilt into the Convento San Gabriel, using the stones from the One thing I didn't know that Mike told me about, and pointed out with this mysterious map, was that you can still see some of the Aztec artwork used in the building of the church. On this stone, we see a common Aztec symbol that's recorded in various Spanish chronicles, and was known to be important to the Aztecs. So, if you're in Cholula and bump into Mike, get a cup of coffee and say hi from me. Thanks, Mike. All right, so that's it for pyramid review from Tlachihualtepec, better known as the Pyramid of Cholula. Thank you to my patrons, and if you'd like to know more about ancient history and ruins and archaeology, please subscribe to my channel. The Olmeca, um, Chica, Chica, Chica Yanka.