Mexico is most interesting when you plan your visit around a theme-the old silver mining towns of Guanajuato and Queretaro, for example. You could compare and contrast. Or perhaps a tour of the Mayan archaeological sights. Maybe even Lana Turner's Acapulco. Cholula is the logical headquarters for day tours to the best of the Mexican colonial churches, and while I admit this doesn't sound as much fun as tequila-soaked afternoons poolside at the Villa Vera, you will be a better person for it.

The area surrounding Cholula probably has the best examples of these remarkable buildings. And let me emphasize that these are not little wayside chapels or rustic adobe missions like the Alamo. These are great big churches, some the size of cathedrals, many meant to be fortresses against Indian attack. Their naves can soar stories and their walls can be 10 feet thick. They're the country cousins of the great European churches of the period, and while it sounds incongruous that we should have any significant Renaissance architecture in the Western Hemisphere, we do-and the best of it is within easy reach of Cholula. Don't miss Acatepec, Huejotzingo, Atlixco or Calpan. And above all, don't miss Santa Maria Tonanzintla, with its incredible interior of gold leaf and angles. It's considered the icon of the artistic synthesis that occurred when the Old World collided with the New.

There are two excellent places to stay in Cholula. La Quinta Luna is a bed and breakfast in an elegantly remodeled old building downtown, and the Villas Archeologicas is a pretty resort set down incongruously in the middle of a cornfield. The view of the pyramid from this angle is striking, and you really get a feeling of some mystical place of long ago.

Still, after all the churches and pyramids, my favorite building in Cholula remains the insane asylum. It's a neoclassical building dating from 1910, rather handsome and dignified and set at the base of the pyramid. I spend time in its gardens in the afternoon, feeding a one-eyed cat that seems to live there. Every once in a while an inmate escapes and they get out an old VW Beetle with a great big loudspeaker on top and drive through the streets saying, "Attention. A lunatic has just escaped. He was last seen wearing a blue shirt and brown pants . . ."

Just another day in a town that has seen it all, many times over.