Qualla: Cholula, Puebla

Cholula, Puebla: Introduction

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Codo from chitown (the city where crime pays), CC BY-SA 2.0. A local saying claims Cholula has 365 churches — one for every day of the year. The real number is closer to 37, which is still remarkable for a city of roughly 120,000 people. But the count misses the point. Cholula's churches are built on something older and larger than any of them: the Great Pyramid of Cholula, the biggest pyramid by volume anywhere on Earth. From the air, it does not look like a pyramid at all. Centuries of accumulated earth and vegetation have turned it into a broad green hill, crowned since the sixteenth century by the Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, a white-and-yellow sanctuary that catches the Puebla Valley sunlight like a beacon. Beneath that hill, eight kilometers of tunnels wind through the ancient structure, revealing layer upon layer of construction spanning more than a thousand years.

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Image: Codo from chitown (the city where crime pays) | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cholula, Puebla: A City Older Than Memory

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carlos Adampol Galindo from DF, México, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cholula is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth and the oldest still-inhabited city in the Americas. Its origins stretch back to at least the second century BCE, when it began as a small village in the shadow of the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. By ...

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Image: Carlos Adampol Galindo from DF, México | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cholula, Puebla: The Conquest and the Cross

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlejandroLinaresGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0. In October 1519, Hernan Cortes arrived in Cholula on his march toward the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. What followed was a massacre. Spanish soldiers and their Tlaxcalan allies killed thousands of Cholulans in what Cortes claimed was a preemptive response to a planned ambush. T...

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Image: AlejandroLinaresGarcia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cholula, Puebla: Eighteen Neighborhoods, One Calendar

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EDUSAST, CC BY-SA 3.0. Modern Cholula is divided between two municipalities — San Pedro Cholula and San Andres Cholula — but the more meaningful division is its eighteen barrios, each named for its patron saint affixed to the original pre-Hispanic neighborhood name: San Miguel Tianguisnahuac, Santiago ...

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Image: EDUSAST | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cholula, Puebla: Between the Volcanoes and the University

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlejandroLinaresGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cholula sits at the western edge of the city of Puebla's metropolitan area, at an elevation of approximately 2,150 meters. To the west, the snow-capped volcanoes Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl dominate the horizon. The city's street grid, laid out in the early colonial period, is ...

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Image: AlejandroLinaresGarcia | CC BY-SA 4.0