The Great Pyramid of Cholula, known in Nahuatl as Tlachihualtépetl or made-by-hand mountain, dominates the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley beneath what appears to be a natural hill. Construction began by the later Formative period, around the third century BCE, and continued through numerous enlargements. Successive communities built new platforms over older temples using adobe, earth, and stone. The accumulated base became the largest known pyramid by volume, although its height is less dramatic than many better-known Mesoamerican monuments.

Cholula grew into a major religious, commercial, and political center connected with routes across central Mexico and toward the Gulf coast. Temples, plazas, residences, murals, and altars surrounded the pyramid. The site's cultural affiliations changed over time, including strong contacts with Teotihuacan and later traditions linking Cholula to Quetzalcoatl. By the centuries before Spanish conquest, ceremonial focus had shifted away from the great mound to other sacred precincts, but the city remained densely settled and attracted pilgrims and merchants from a wide region.

Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies entered Cholula in 1519 and killed many inhabitants in the event remembered as the Cholula massacre. Spanish colonial rule reorganized religious and civic space through churches, parishes, and new government. A sanctuary dedicated to Nuestra Señora de los Remedios was established on the pyramid's summit in the colonial period. The present church reflects rebuilding after earthquakes and later campaigns, creating a powerful visual layering of Catholic pilgrimage above a pre-Hispanic sacred mountain.

Modern study expanded with tunnels driven through the mound during twentieth-century archaeological projects. Those passages revealed superimposed construction phases but also created conservation and drainage challenges. Excavated areas such as the Patio of the Altars and surviving murals help explain the ceremonial complex, while most of the pyramid remains protected beneath soil and vegetation. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History manages the archaeological zone. The summit church remains an active sanctuary and a landmark visible across the valley.

The monument cannot be understood as a simple contest between an Indigenous pyramid and a Spanish church. Both have long histories of rebuilding, ritual, political meaning, and community attachment. The grass-covered mass protects vulnerable adobe even as moisture and erosion threaten it, and the colonial building above is not the first version of the sanctuary. Together they show how Cholula's sacred landscape was appropriated, transformed, and maintained across more than two millennia. Archaeology, pilgrimage, civic identity, and living religious practice continue to overlap on the same hill.