Cholula

According to legend, before the creation of the world Cholula laid in darkness and suspense. All around was the plain covered with water. Once the sun came out, here came the Giants with a deformed figure. Captivated by the light of the sun, they decided to build a structure that reaches the sky. The god of heaven was angry and ordered to the celestials to confuse the plans of giants. The gods destroyed the building and scattered the builders in different corners of the world. The legend about the giants would remain a beautiful fairy tale, but it had confirmation. Spanish monks wrote about giant tooth detected in the village of San Augustine and about 30 giants living 30 km from Guadalajara, among them three women. The physician of New Spain and the personal doctor of Philip II Gregorio Lopez noted that their height reached 5 m.

At the time of the Conquest the city was an important economic and religious center. The Feathered Serpent was worshiped here, and the people devoted to this deity the pyramid, biggest by volume across America. The Indians tried to build in Cholula some sort of Tower of Babel. It is known that the volume of construction amounted 3 million cubic meters. In the era of the Spanish conquest of the country Cholula was one of the blossoming cities of then. According to Cortez, there were 20 thousand of houses 400 temples here. By order of Hernan Cortes, the conquistadors plundered rich Cholula and killed most of its inhabitants.

The Great Pyramid of Cholula, or Tlachihualtepetl ("the mountain made by man") is undoubtedly the main attraction of the town. Today, it is buried in a green hill, on the top of which in the XVI century a blinding church was built, La Iglesia de los Remedios – a symbol of Cholula. Only the part of the pyramid is excavated on the one hand to not destroy the hill. Interior corridors of pyramid have 8 km of length, and the length of the base is almost 400 m. According to this indicator, it surpasses even the Great Pyramid of Giza, although its height is much more modest – about 60 m.

The pyramid was discovered in the early twentieth century, the 1930s the tunnels were dug to study it better. Thanks to them, scientists have learned about the hallways and murals inside the structure. In 1997, "the phenomenon of the snake" was discovered in Cholula: during solstices on March 22 and December 22 the moving line, which resembles a snake crawling, appeared on a large temple pyramid in the morning and evening. A similar phenomenon is observed on the pyramid of Cuculcan at Chichen Itza. Archaeologists have recovered only a small part of the pyramid, and who knows what secrets it will open in the future.