Puebla Tehuacán

This ancient ceremonial center of the Totonaca culture is located northeast of Cuetzalan, 190 kilometers from the state capital. Yohualichan is believed to have been founded at the beginning of the Classic period (0 to 900 A.D.), before the invasion of the bellicose language that the Nahuatl groups began to abandon around the mid-Posclásico period (900 to 1519 A.D.).

Yohualichan means "place of the night", its ruins consist of a rectangular square around which there are five mounds or pyramids with different numbers of basements and remnants of temples in their peaks. Although not all the mounds have been excavated, there is clearly a unity of style given by the niches that are in-between the basements of each of the pyramids. On the site there is also a ballgame field, whose existence can be explained by the fact that for primitive civilizations this game was one of its main rituals; when striking the ball they were trying to reproduce the participants travel by the stars to heaven.

These ruins recall much to the pre-Hispanic city of El Tajín in Veracruz, which is located only 60 kilometers away in a straight line. The niches of the basements and grecas that decorate the slope of the largest pyramid of Yohualichan also exist in the holy city of El Tajín. Since both sites belonged to the culture Totonaca it is assumed that their relations were narrow paths through the prehispánics, some traces of which remain. In this regard Yohualichan is interesting because it finds the ancient presence of the coastal indigenous in the region of the northeastern mountains of Puebla.