Teotihuacan - The World's 3rd Largest Pyramid & the Basilica of Guadalupe
Teotihuacan, the "City of the Gods" located about 30 miles northeast of Mexico City. At its height, this was a teeming metropolis of 100,000 or more inhabitants, with a well defined class structure. Its people had knowledge of writing, a bar-and-dot numbering system, and a 260-day calendar.
The remains of the civic-ceremonial center alone cover an area of more than two square miles. The city was built on an almost perfect north-south grid plan and includes a variety of imposing pyramids, temples and single story palaces lining the two-mile long Avenue of the Dead. The site is noted for the uniformity of its architectural style and the unique "talud-tablero" building technique in which sloping walls were faced with decorative panels
The most prominent structures are the Pyramid of the Sun, the third largest pyramid in the world, and the slightly smaller Pyramid of the Moon. At the southern extreme of the Avenue of the Dead lies the Temple of Quetzalcoatl originally adorned with colorful frescoes.
Teotihuacan was deliberately burned and plundered in the 7th century, its influence elsewhere suddenly ceasing. The perpetrators and motives of the great city's demise remain a mystery. Yet its aura as a most sacred site survived to the era of the Aztecs and even to the present.
The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Some 460 years ago, an elderly Indian man named Chuauhtlatoczin ["Juan Diego" in Spanish] had a vision of Mary, at Tepeyac, a squalid Indian village outside of Mexico City. Mary directed Juan Diego to tell the bishop to build the church in Tepeyac. The Spanish Bishop, initially dismissed the Indian’s tale — but then, he told Diego to bring some sort of proof. So, three days later, the Virgin Mary appeared again and told Juan Diego to pick the roses that had miraculously bloomed at the top of a nearby hill, and take them as a sign to the Bishop.
When the Indian opened his poncho to present the roses to the Bishop, the flowers poured out from his poncho to reveal an image of the Virgin Mary painted on the inside of the poncho. That image hangs behind the alter in the Basilica of Guadalupe, and is on everything from t-shirts to automobile air fresheners.
Teotihuacan
The Basilica of Guadalupe
