PUEBLA, Mexico _ Look west on a clear day from any hilltop in Puebla. In the suburb of Cholula, seven miles outside downtown, you'll spy an orange church and a snow-topped peak looming behind it.
This church is Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, built in the 1570s, damaged by a major earthquake, now whole and open again. The peak is the volcano Popocatepetl, alive and fuming.
That curiously symmetrical hill beneath the church? That's not a hill at all.
It's the Great Pyramid of Cholula, the largest known pyramid on Earth, begun before Christ, completed long before the Spanish arrived, now cloaked in vegetation.
Consider this easy-to-misread scene a fair warning: Puebla, about 85 miles southeast of Mexico City, is full of earthen surprises, architectural wonders and human resilience.
I know this from two visits. I spent five days here in July gathering information for a travel article that was to be published in the fall. Then came the magnitude-7.1 Mexican earthquake of Sept. 19, which killed about 220 people in Mexico City and 45 in the state of Puebla, most of them in small, outlying towns. I shelved the story.
But in the days and weeks after, it became clear that Puebla, whose downtown core includes more than 2,500 colonial buildings from the 16th to 18th centuries, had survived remarkably intact. I returned in February.
I found scaffolding on several buildings and heard from several vendors and hoteliers about the post-quake slump in visitation. A taxi driver showed me video on his phone of the Cholula church losing the tops of its two towers.
Five months after the temblor, just one visitor attraction remained shut because of quake damage _ the 18th century Casa de Alfenique museum, closed indefinitely.
Meanwhile, the list of what endures in Puebla is long and wonderful enough that it might astonish a newcomer.
Here's some of what I found, beginning with recent additions and rediscoveries.
