Three days in Puebla: tiled, baroque and entirely without restraint

The first afternoon is four blocks square. Start on the zocalo, which is a proper civic square with big old trees, arcades on three sides, cafe tables under them and a fountain in the middle, and which fills up rather than empties as the evening goes on.

The cathedral takes up the south side. It went up between 1575 and 1640, it is grey, heavy and severe compared with everything around it, and its two towers are the tallest on any church in the country. Inside is enormous and rather dark, with an octagonal altar canopy in the middle that is the best thing in it.

Then walk two blocks north for the reason people come. The Rosary chapel is a side chapel of the Santo Domingo church, finished at the end of the seventeenth century, and it is small, which is what makes it overwhelming: every square centimetre of wall, arch, vault and dome is carved and covered in gold leaf, with painted panels and plaster figures crowded into whatever space is left. Nineteenth century writers called it the eighth wonder of the world, which is silly, and you will understand the impulse.

Eat around the square afterwards. The covered market of craft stalls a few streets east is where to buy talavera pottery if you want any, and the streets around it stay busy late.

Fifteen minutes west of the centre stands the largest pyramid on earth by volume. This is not obvious when you arrive, because it looks like a grassy hill with a church on top, which is exactly what the Spanish took it for: they put a shrine on the summit in the sixteenth century without realising what they were building on. Under the grass are four superimposed structures, the earliest of them begun more than two thousand years ago and each built over the last by a different culture.

You can walk a lit tunnel driven through the base, come out among the excavated courtyards on the south side, and then climb the path to the church at the top for a view of Popocatepetl over the roofs. The town around it is low, church-heavy and pleasant, with a big student population and a good market, and is worth an hour before or after.

Then the two village churches south of the pyramid, a kilometre and a half from each other, both from the turn of the eighteenth century and both extraordinary. One is faced entirely in glazed tiles, blue and white and yellow, so that the front of it glitters. The other is plain outside and, inside, is a riot of painted plaster covering every surface: fruit, flowers, feathers and hundreds of small brown-faced angels, made by local craftsmen who were given a baroque brief and produced something else entirely. No photography inside that one.

Taxis and colectivos link all three easily. A morning at the pyramid and an early afternoon at the churches is a comfortable day.

One room on the last morning, and it is worth setting an alarm for. The Palafoxiana is the oldest public library in the Americas: a bishop gave his private collection to the city in the middle of the seventeenth century on condition that anybody be allowed to read it, and the hall it now occupies, three tiers of carved wooden shelving under a barrel vault, was built for it in the century after. More than forty thousand volumes, an altarpiece at the far end, and no browsing: you look at it as an object rather than a working library, which is the only disappointment.

Then walk southeast into the old quarter for the last hour. Painters work out of the ground floors along one street, there are dealers in furniture and religious carving, and at weekends a flea market spreads across the little square. It is the least polished part of the centre and the most enjoyable to wander.

Buy talavera before you go if you are going to. The real thing is made in a handful of certified workshops in the city, is heavy, and is worth the weight.