Teotihuacan housed most of a valley under twin pyramids
Teotihuacan, in a sub-valley of Mexico’s Valley of Mexico, built the Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon—among the Americas’ greatest pre-Columbian monuments. Covering about twenty-one square kilometres, it held eighty to ninety percent of the valley’s people in multi-family compounds along the Avenue of the Dead.
The ruins sit within the State of México’s San Juan Teotihuacán municipality, about forty kilometres north-east of Mexico City, within a protected zone of 83 square kilometres that UNESCO listed in 1987. With 1,313,321 visitors in 2024, it was the country’s second most visited archaeological site. Despite its closeness to the Aztec capital, it was not a Mexica foundation.
Beginning as a religious centre around the first century CE, it became the largest city of the pre-Columbian Americas. Apartment buildings several floors high gave it an unusually dense population. The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon rank among the greatest monuments of the ancient Americas.
Who lived there is disputed: Nahua, Otomi and Totonac peoples have all been proposed, and Maya and Oto-Pamean traits suggest a mixed population. Migrants clearly arrived from many regions, especially Oaxaca and the Gulf Coast. After the city fell around 550 CE, regional powers such as Xochicalco and Tula dominated central Mexico.
Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs named the ruins centuries later. The name is usually glossed as birthplace of the gods, echoing creation myths set there, while Thelma D. Sullivan understood it as the place belonging to those who travel the gods’ road. In Nahuatl the stress falls on the syllable wa, while Spanish stresses the last syllable, so neither needs a written accent. The original name is lost, but Classic Maya glyphs call the city puh, Place of Reeds, much as later central Mexican cities like Tula and Cholula took the name Tollan.
Source: Teotihuacan
