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If you believe my guide book then
San Agustin and Tierradentro are one of the most important archaeological sites in South America. Well they better be because the bus ride to San Agustin consisted of over 4 hours being shaken in a minibus as the road to the town is still not paved. Tierradentro is another 7 hours of which 2 are again on dirt road and on the way back there are about 2 more hours of the same.
After all that you see statues carved out of stone in San Agustin and underground burial chambers in Tierradentro. This area was a few years ago a hot zone with quite a bit of guerrilla activity. At one stage the guerrillas even stopped and checked the traffic on route quite regularly but I guess they stopped doing this as we haven’t seen them. We only saw three guys with machine guns and camouflage suits on the way which did not look like the regular army or the police but they were quite friendly.
The statues in San Agustin were yet again produces by a mysterious civilization of which not a lot is known. It is thought that they evolved around 600Ad and roamed this are up until the 1400 century and vanished before the Spanish arrived. So far more than 500 statues have been found in the area. Most of them were close to tombs so they were most likely there to protect the dead. Nice to look at and take pictures of. Have a look some of the statues are quite funky.
Tierradentro was created by another civilization which disappeared too quite a while ago. These folks were not really into stone statues (they created some) but they liked to dig. Therefore the hills around Tierradentro are like Swiss cheese, full of holes. They didn’t like it easy too so they dug the underground burial chambers out of solid rock. Some of the tombs are in up to 9m depth and are the only of their kind in the Americas. So far over a hundred tombs have been discovered but it’s likely that there are many more. Most of the burial object have been removed from the tombs by either archaeologists or grave robbers and can now be seen in various museums and homes around the world. What is left there are the tombs themselves and some of the original paintings.
I don’t know what possessed me but I got convinced by a Swiss guy who lied in the area some years ago that it might be a good idea to do a horse trek (again) to a rock formation called the pyramid. It was certainly worth it but my bum and my legs weren’t thankful for it. The stirrups here are enclosed in the front and always to small for my feet. The result is that I do not get a good foothold and have to stand on the front of my feet all the time. Good exercise for some muscles but is not that comfortable over 4 hours.
Next stop Popayán
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