Qualla: Great Pyramid of Cholula

Great Pyramid of Cholula: Introduction

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Altevir Vechia at Portuguese Wikipedia, Public domain. From the air, it could pass for an ordinary hill. A broad mound of grass and trees rises above the streets of San Andres Cholula, its summit crowned by the white-and-yellow Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de los Remedios. But this is no hill. Beneath the surface lies the Great Pyramid of Cholula, known in Nahuatl as Tlachihualtepetl -- the "constructed mountain" -- and it is the largest pyramid by volume ever built. Its base covers roughly 94,500 square meters, more than twice the footprint of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The structure rises only 25 meters, but what it lacks in height it compensates for in sheer mass: an estimated 4.45 million cubic meters of adobe brick, accumulated over more than a thousand years of continuous construction.

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Image: Altevir Vechia at Portuguese Wikipedia | Public domain

Great Pyramid of Cholula: A Thousand Years of Nesting Dolls

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lievanomx, CC BY-SA 3.0. The pyramid was not built in a single campaign. Beginning in the third century BCE, successive cultures expanded the structure by encasing each previous version in a new shell of adobe and earth -- a construction method archaeologists liken to nesting dolls. At least six major bu...

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Image: Lievanomx | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Pyramid of Cholula: Five Miles of Tunnels

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Victor Hugo Martinez Duran, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1931, architect Ignacio Marquina began driving exploratory tunnels into the pyramid's interior. By 1954, those tunnels stretched approximately eight kilometers -- five miles -- through the layered structure, revealing murals, earlier construction phases, and the sheer complexi...

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Image: Victor Hugo Martinez Duran | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Pyramid of Cholula: The Church on the Summit

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hernán García Crespo from DF, Mexico, CC BY 2.0. When the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, they built the Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de los Remedios atop the mound -- whether they knew they were building on the hemisphere's largest pyramid is a matter of scholarly debate. The current church dates to the nineteenth centu...

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Image: Hernán García Crespo from DF, Mexico | CC BY 2.0

Great Pyramid of Cholula: Hidden in Plain Sight

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlejandroLinaresGarcia, CC BY-SA 4.0. The pyramid's disguise is its own history. Centuries of abandonment allowed earth, vegetation, and erosion to transform its angular surfaces into the contours of a natural hill. The Spanish built roads and farms around it without recognizing what lay beneath. Today, the city of C...

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Image: AlejandroLinaresGarcia | CC BY-SA 4.0