According to one version of history – and there are many versions – when Hernán Cortés first gazed on Cholula he declared it to be the most beautiful city outside of Spain. He then ordered it destroyed.
Apparently some of his cohorts paid little attention. Although a massacre occurred, followed by the destruction of a reported 400 pagan temples, Cholula today thrives, supposedly the oldest continuously-inhabited city in all of Mexico. It lies about 80 miles east of Mexico City and today is really a suburb of Puebla.
Founded nearly two millenniums ago, Cholula became a great religious center, although as the centuries passed it had its cycles of prosperity and decline. In 1519 it apparently was best known for the ceramics it produced, although Cortés was later to declare that he ordered that massacre in self-defense. However, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas would report the killing was nothing but the cold-blooded murder of harmless potters slain as a means of terrorizing the Aztecs.
To demonstrate that they had come not for gold but to spread the word of God, the Conquistadores ordered Catholic shrines erected upon the ruins of the destroyed pagan temples in Cholula, although this did not require a church be built for every day of the year as some guidebooks claim.
The most spectacular of these churches, honoring the Virgen de los Remedios, went up upon a hill overlooking the city. Apparently the Spaniards at the time did not realize that the heathen sanctuary the church replaced stood upon a pyramid, the largest pyramid in the world. At the time it was at least 1,000 years old and it looked like an ordinary hill.
During periods of prehispanic decline in Cholula, the pyramid
-- bigger (although not taller) than any pyramid in Egypt -- gradually had been covered over with soil, then grass. Trees grew upon it. Archaeologists have tunneled into the structure and reportedly found some human bones, although whether these are entombed personages of importance or merely dead workers has yet to be determined.
The pyramid was built by the Aztecs to honor Quetzacoatl, a god who – if I understand the story correctly – became a man. Or he was a man who took the name of a god, much as many Mexicans today bear the name Jesus. The god had existed for centuries when this priest -- I assume he was a priest – appeared and took his name. Some say the priest was a European, bearded and of fair complexion, possibly Ireland’s Saint Brendan. As is the wont of priests, this one became involved in politics, favoring peace and love, opposing human sacrifice. The establishment, favoring war and the looting that goes with it, banished Quetzacoatl. Legend has it that he reached the coast and sailed off toward the east, promising someday to return. The Aztecs feared Cortés was the returning Quetzcoatl.
The Irish, for their part, tell of this Saint Brendan, who they also call Brendan the Voyager, or Brendan the Navigator, and how in the fifth century he sailed out into the Atlantic, eventually returning to spin tales of a great new land across the sea. Was this our boy?
The existence of the pyramid and the archaeological zone around it led to the opening some three decades ago of what began as a Club Med Villa, one of five at different archaeological sites in the country. Now this Cholula Club Med Villa has a rival, the tiny but elegant Quinta Luna, where a former rector of the Universidad de la Americas has converted his home into a six-room hotel.
The university breathed new life into Cholula. The institution traces its roots to Mexico City College, founded in 1940. Most students came from the United States. The college became the University of the Americas in 1963, decided that it needed to expand and, with a grant from the Mary Street Jenkins Foundation, began moving to Puebla.
With the move, the institution became increasingly more Mexican. Until 1975, when Dr. Fernando Macías Rendón was installed, every president had come from the United States. During the first years in Cholula, wrote one newspaper, blonde college girls shared cobbled lanes with old men leading donkeys and local mothers worried about how to protect the morals of their sons. Now the school in Cholula has become La Universidad de las Americas with foreign students relegated to a branch campus in Puebla.
Not that there is anything wrong with Puebla. It is the Rome of Mexico, at least downtown. The historic center has been designated at World Heritage Site, which is not to say it is dull. Some of Mexico’s most classic dishes originated in Puebla, including mole and chiles en nogada.
But back in Cholula, the Universidad has brought some exciting changes. La Quinta Luna is only one of these. The ancient town today, youthful and young at heart, is enjoying a fresh cycle of prosperity. Long-time residents moan that it is becoming increasingly expensive, but what place in the world is not?
Restaurants are good and the night life is lively. Pure joy comes from lounging over coffee on the plaza, gazing out from the ancient portals at the Franciscan monastery of San Gabriel and at the towers of the San Pedro church from which monks and priests once glared at each other. Christians they may have been, and Catholics as well, but they rivaled each other when it came to saving souls, and passing the collection plate. Religious disputes did not end with the departure of Quetzacoatl.
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