July 30, 2026
Great Pyramid of Cholula: Stand in the middle of Cholula, in the Mexican state of Puebla, and look east. There’s a hill. Grass, scrubby trees, a path winding up the side, and at the top a small yellow church with two white towers, the kind you see on a thousand Mexican hilltops. Families climb it on Sunday afternoons. It takes about twenty minutes. Nobody’s out of breath at the top.
That hill is a building. It has 4.45 million cubic metres of material inside it, which is roughly twice the Great Pyramid of Giza, and Guinness World Records lists it as the largest pyramid ever built by anyone, anywhere. The base runs about 450 metres on each side — Giza’s is 230. And for four hundred years, nobody had any idea, because the thing had gone green.
The Nahuatl name is Tlachihualtepetl, which means man-made mountain, so the local population clearly hadn’t forgotten. The Spanish just didn’t recognise it. By the time Cortés’s men came through in 1519 the structure had been abandoned for centuries and was covered in soil and vegetation — a green hill in the middle of a flat valley, unremarkable except that it was the highest ground around. In 1594 the Spanish built a church on top of it, the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, which is what you see today. Standard colonial practice: put the church on the high point. They were doing exactly what they always did. They just happened to be doing it on top of the largest pyramid on the planet.
It isn’t one pyramid either. It’s six, stacked. Building started somewhere around the 3rd century BC and continued through the 9th century AD, with successive cultures encasing the previous structure inside a bigger one — the Mesoamerican habit of building over rather than tearing down. Twelve centuries of construction. Each generation swallowing the last one whole.
Archaeologists started tunnelling into it in 1931 and have cut roughly eight kilometres of passages through the interior since. About 800 metres are open to visitors, and walking them is a strange experience: low, cool, lit, and you’re inside a hill that is also a building, running your hand along a wall somebody laid before the Romans reached Britain. It’s genuinely one of the most underrated hours in Mexican tourism, and it costs less than a coffee in most European capitals.
Here’s the part that surprises people who work in archaeology: the site is barely studied. Full excavation is impossible, because the church on top is itself a protected colonial monument and a working place of worship, and you can’t dig out a pyramid without taking the church down with it. So the largest pyramid on earth sits there, mostly unexcavated, holding up a Catholic church, and neither one can be removed without destroying the other. Mexico is full of tidy resolutions to its history. This is not one of them.
Cholula was not a minor town. It was one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the Americas and a pilgrimage centre — the sacred city of the region, the place people walked to. In October 1519 Cortés arrived on his way to Tenochtitlán, with several thousand Tlaxcalan allies who had their own long-standing grudge against Cholula, and something happened in the main plaza that historians have argued about ever since. Cortés said he had discovered a plot to kill his men and struck first. Indigenous accounts describe an unprovoked massacre of unarmed nobles who had been summoned to assemble.
The death toll depends entirely on who is counting. Cortés wrote that his troops killed 3,000 in three hours. One of his own men, Vázquez de Tapia, claimed 30,000, which almost nobody believes since much of the population had already fled. Scholarly estimates generally land somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000. The city was sacked, and the message travelled ahead of the Spanish all the way to the Aztec capital, which was more or less the point.
I’d rather put that here than leave it out. Cholula on a Sunday afternoon is a lovely place — students, ice cream, a plaza full of noise, one of the best small-city food scenes in Mexico. It’s also a site where a few thousand people were killed in an afternoon, and the hill you’re climbing was the reason the city mattered enough to be worth destroying. Both things are the same place.
Puebla sits about eight kilometres from Cholula, and it exists for an unusual reason: it was invented. Most colonial cities in Mexico were built on top of an existing indigenous settlement — that’s why the cathedral is so often standing on a temple. Puebla was founded in 1531 on empty ground between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, laid out on a Renaissance grid before anybody lived in it, and then filled. It became the template other colonial cities in the region were copied from. UNESCO inscribed the historic centre in 1987, site 416.
The result is a city that’s oddly easy to walk. The grid holds, the streets are straight, and the whole centre is roughly 400 blocks of baroque churches, tiled façades and courtyards. Two volcanoes stand behind it. Popocatépetl is about 45 kilometres southwest and, on a clear morning in winter, dominates the view down the street in a way photographs never quite manage.
One building in Puebla is worth planning a morning around even if you don’t care about buildings. The Biblioteca Palafoxiana was founded in 1646 by Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, who donated 5,000 of his own books on the condition that anyone who could read be allowed in — not only clergy, not only seminarians, anyone. That condition is why UNESCO calls it the first public library in the Americas, and why it went onto the Memory of the World register in 2005. It holds around 45,000 volumes. The oldest is a 1473 printing of Herodotus. It is still in the room it was built for, with the original carved shelving, and walking in produces the same reaction in almost everybody: a short silence, then someone whispers.
If you’re reading this in August, this section is the reason to move fast.
Chiles en nogada is a poblano chile stuffed with a mix of meat and fruit, covered in a cold walnut cream, and scattered with pomegranate seeds and parsley — green, white and red, the colours of the Mexican flag. The story is that Augustinian nuns at the Convent of Santa Mónica in Puebla created it in August 1821 for Agustín de Iturbide, who had just signed the treaty that sealed Mexican independence, and built the dish around the flag of the new army. Historians treat the legend with some caution. Nobody in Puebla treats the dish with any caution at all.
Chiles en nogada, Puebla, Mexico — seasonal dish
It’s seasonal for a real reason rather than a marketing one: the walnuts and the pomegranates are both harvested in a narrow window, and the season runs roughly from the start of July to the end of September, with August the peak. Outside those weeks you can order it in some places and you’d be eating a worse version made with imported fruit. Poblanos are unbending about this. Ask a local when the season is and you’ll get an answer to the week.
Mole poblano is the other one — the dark, thick sauce with chiles and chocolate in it, which tradition credits to a nun at the Convent of Santa Rosa in the late 1600s. That legend is also shaky, and also beside the point. Puebla is one of the two or three cities in Mexico where the food alone justifies the trip, and unlike Oaxaca it hasn’t yet been discovered by every food-tour operator in North America. Give it three years.
The blue-and-white ceramic on half the façades in Puebla is Talavera, and it isn’t decoration applied to the city — it’s most of the reason the city looks the way it does. The technique came over from Spain in the 16th century and the making of it has barely changed: same clays, same two firings, same hand-painting, same restricted palette. In 2019 UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, jointly with the Spanish ceramic towns of Talavera de la Reina and El Puente del Arzobispo — the first Mexican craft to get a shared Mexico–Spain listing.
Talavera shop, Historic Centre of Puebla, UNESCO World Heritage
The workshops are in Puebla city, Cholula, Atlixco and Tecali de Herrera, and the certified ones will let you watch the whole process. Worth knowing before you shop: certified Talavera is expensive and slow, most of what’s sold in the markets is not it, and the difference is visible once someone has shown you once. Half an hour in a workshop changes what you buy.
Puebla sits at 2,135 metres, so it’s temperate all year and cool at night — you’ll want a jacket in January regardless of what the daytime forecast says. The rains run roughly June to September, usually as an afternoon downpour rather than a washout day. October to April is the reliable window, and the clearest volcano views come in the winter months.
August, for the reasons above, is its own argument. Late October into early November brings Day of the Dead, which in Puebla state is quieter and less overrun than in Oaxaca or Pátzcuaro. And the fifth of May is the anniversary of the 1862 Battle of Puebla, when a Mexican force of around 4,500 beat back a French army of about 6,000 at the forts above the city. Americans celebrate that date more enthusiastically than most of Mexico does. Puebla itself is the exception, because Puebla is where it happened.
The honest caveat is the volcano. Popocatépetl is active, not dormant, and it does periodically put ash into the air — which occasionally means flight disruption at Mexico City or Puebla and a closed hiking radius on that side. It doesn’t stop trips, and hasn’t for years. It’s just a thing to build a day of slack around rather than be surprised by. Check the CENAPRED alert level in the week before you fly.
Getting there is the easy part. Puebla is about 134 kilometres from Mexico City, roughly two hours by road on a good motorway, with buses running constantly. There’s an airport at Puebla itself, though most international visitors come through Mexico City. It’s the rare Mexican destination where the transfer is short enough that a two-night add-on actually works.
Puebla and Cholula are unusually good for company trips, and the reason is geography: it’s the only place in Mexico where a group can eat at the level of Oaxaca, walk a UNESCO city centre, go inside a pyramid, and be back at a hacienda by dinner — inside one valley, with nothing more than a twenty-minute drive between any two of them. No internal flight. No four-hour transfer. For a three-day incentive programme, that’s the whole game.
The activities also happen to be things people remember. A Talavera workshop where everyone paints a tile and takes it home. A chiles en nogada cooking class in August, with the walnuts being peeled in front of you, which takes hours and is the reason the dish costs what it costs. The tunnels under the pyramid, private, before opening. And the converted 17th-century haciendas around Atlixco, which are the reason a good number of destination weddings quietly end up in Puebla instead of on a beach — the flower nurseries of Atlixco supply half of central Mexico, so the flowers are grown twenty minutes away rather than flown in.
Marysol Travel has spent 18 years assembling Mexico itineraries with people on the ground, and this is a region where that matters more than usual, because the good parts are specific. Which workshop is actually certified. Which restaurant is doing the nogada properly this week rather than out of a tub. Which hacienda has the courtyard that holds 80 people without an echo.
The pyramid isn’t going anywhere. It has been sitting under that hill for two thousand years and it survived the one civilisation that wanted it gone, mostly by being unrecognisable. But the walnuts have about ten weeks, and haciendas for next spring are being held now. If you’re thinking about Mexico for a group, a wedding or a trip of your own, tell us roughly what you have in mind at marysoltravel.com/contact/ and we’ll build it around the calendar rather than against it.