San Agustín Archaeological Park

Scattered across green hills above the young Magdalena river stand hundreds of monolithic stone figures, carved between roughly the first and eighth centuries by a society that left no written record and had disappeared long before Europeans arrived. The statues guard burial mounds and stone-lined tombs, and their subjects are consistently unsettling: jaguar-fanged beings, birds of prey gripping snakes, figures holding infants, warriors with clubs. Some retain traces of paint. The Fuente de Lavapatas is a religious site carved directly into a streambed, where channels, pools and animal figures were cut into the rock so that water runs through the sculpture. The park spreads over several separate sites, and the standard way to link the outlying ones is on horseback.

History

The dates of the statues are uncertain: Wikipedia puts their carving between about 5 and 400 AD, and the identity of the carvers remains a mystery, as the site is largely unexcavated. They were first described by the Spanish friar Juan de Santa Gertrudis (1724-1799), who passed through San Agustín in mid-1756 as a missionary and wrote about them in his four-volume Maravillas de la naturaleza. The park, which holds the largest collection of religious monuments and megalithic sculptures in Latin America and is considered the world's largest necropolis, was declared a World Heritage Site in 1995 (Wikipedia, San Agustín Archaeological Park).

What you'll find

• The Mesitas - burial mounds with their guardian statues in the main park.
• Fuente de Lavapatas - the ceremonial site carved into a living streambed.
• Alto de los Ídolos - a separate hilltop site with the largest statue and painted tombs.
• The forest of statues - a gathered avenue of monoliths near the park entrance.

When to go

The drier windows, December to March and July to August, make the unpaved tracks and horseback rides far easier. The hills are green year-round and mornings are usually clearer than afternoons.

Practical notes

Getting here is the hard part: the road from Bogotá is very long, and the route from Popayán over the mountains is spectacular but slow and rough. The sites are spread out, so a full visit takes two days and either horses or a jeep. Many statues stand under protective shelters, which preserves them and flattens the photographs.

Nearby

Tierradentro's underground painted tombs are a rough day's travel away; Popayán's white colonial centre lies west.