Category: Colonial Colombia 2018

Big bottomed ants, a virgin, and tropical dry forest add up to “the most beautiful city in Colombia”
January 6, 2018.
If you look at the CIA World Fact book, as I did, you’ll get an idea of the expanse of Colombia. Superimposing a Colombian map on the United States stretches the country the length of the Mississippi River, from Minneapolis to New Orleans. While we’ve sampled only a small part of it (we’re only 150 air miles from Bogota), but that includes a wide variety of habitats and a lot more than the 150 miles through the mountains. We’ve left the savanna behind in favor of high desert and canyons (and a 30 minute plane ride or 8 hour automobile ride back to Bogota, which says something about the transportation system. There are only a few “third generation” roads—six lane highways, and the road here, probably second generation, is a two-lane toll road that goes through every town, roughly following the ridges). As we’ve lost elevation, though still at around 4500 feet, we’ve passed through banana, orange, and coffee farms. The big product here, though, was tobacco.
Two things about that crop: first, it required sunshine, which mean most of the existing trees were cut down. The brochure on Barichara, where we’re staying in a charming boutique hotel, Moorish/Spanish style, says the tropical dry forest is the most endangered ecosystem of all, with only 2% remaining pristine. Tobacco and other agricultural pursuits have had a hand in that environmental change.
Second, the tobacco industry has declined, with the purchase of the local manufacturer by the British American Tobacco conglomerate. One result was a rather imaginative conversion of the old tobacco plant to a mall, with the foreman’s house converted to a museum. The exhausted tobacco lands need banned fertilizers to be productive again. The second-rate tobacco still produced here is for local consumption.
The current “cash crop,” however, is tourism, based around the 8000 population in Barichara. Legend has it that a peasant here around 1700 found a rock with the image of the Virgin, and convinced his friends to build a church, around which the town grew. The local clergy, however, condemned this as idolatry, destroyed the church, and built a “purified one” on the site in the mid 18th century. That church still stands, anchoring the square (which unlike Villa de Leyva has trees) that was and is the center of life in Spanish colonies.
The town is full of colonial and republican period homes, white adobe, housing the usual knick-knacks—like indigenous themed jewelry and textiles, specialty coffees and chocolates, restaurants and hotels. Eight thousand inhabitants live here, too. Surprisingly, you don’t see any modern construction in the city proper; the red tiles of the roofs and the hilly nature of the town provide part of the charm.
When we went for a walk to explore what there was, two visits stood out. One was a culture house, which local people created with a variety of gifts—art, cultural artifacts—and the docent who took us around shared a lot of information about the town.

The other visit was to the Paper Museum. It’s an NGO operation designed to provide gainful employment to women. The museum grows a variety of plants that can be turned into paper (did you know pineapple can be made into paper?), gives tours, and creates a variety of paper products for sale. I really liked the lampshades, but I’m certain I’d have shreds if I tried to bring one back.

The town overlooks a deep valley, and the upper part of the town is where one finds the inevitable Liberator statue. What I learned there is that the Boyaca battle ended the war for Colombian independence. There were battles fought to liberate the other countries (the five were Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela; I had listed Panama, but that country did not exist until Theodore Roosevelt helped convince revolutionaries there to separate it from Colombia around 1905 so the US could build the Panama Canal).

It was on that walk we purchased the fried big-bottomed ants that are considered a local delicacy. The “princesses” are captured as they attempt to fly out of the nest to start new colonies, deprived of wings, and roasted.
Supposedly, the ants date back to the indigenous Guane people who inhabited this area from about 1000 a.d. until they were assimilated (or annihilated) by the Spanish. Relatives of the Muisca, they were reputedly taller and lighter-skinned than their neighbors.We learned more about the Guane today at a museum at what purported to be a National Park, which turned out to be a private park. Located at a breathtaking canyon that drops over 3000 feet (“Gran Canon” in local advertisements), the park had a water park, bungee jumping, a zip line, and the second longest cable car ride in the world. We took the last named, which dropped 2500 feet or so to the floor, then went up about 3500 feet to the other side, where we spent an hour wandering among the live traditional entertainers, local foods, and tchotchkes.

So if you want to eat ants (another local delicacy I tried was a mixture of goat intestines) and stay in what was voted the most beautiful old Spanish village in Colombia, you have to come to Barichara. Like we did.
The next day—the ride to Bucaramanga duplicated part of the previous day’s ride through the mountains on a two-lane toll road, but detoured to visit a coffee farm. The company, Hacienda de Roble, has been in business for over 150 years. Coffee grown for export has to meet strict standards. Like tobacco, certain soils and weather are important for growing the crop. A lesser brand, apparently not meeting global tastes, is sold locally. We got to taste four main varieties (there are over 300 different varieties of coffee), and I thought it was easier to tell the difference between the $5 Port and the $50 Port than to distinguish varieties of coffee, which can be even more costly than expensive Port. The farm has a garden with supposedly 72 varieties of coffee, mostly variants of Arabica (you can tell by the name it’s not native to Colombia), fertilized by chicken manure…..Ask for HR-61 if you want to try a coffee developed at the farm.

What impressed Carolyn was the Hacienda. Built by a woman artist in the 1860s, and now a boutique hotel, it’s in the Spanish colonial style. Set on the Mesa de los Santos, at roughly a mile high, the house would make for a comfortable stay. No wonder Carolyn said our next trip should be to visit other haciendas.

Time to go home to our own villa, though. No more mesas, mountains, or colonial villages. Sigh.

January 4, 2018
Villa de Leyva (continued)
When we got to explore the city and the region, I found Villa all that I hoped it would be. The Plaza Mayor, the largest public square in Colombia (perhaps outside of Bogota), surrounded by cobblestone streets, and lovely old colonial architecture—the stucco with balconies or overhangs with arched walkways—looked like something out of a movie set (as indeed it has been featured in a number of movies and TV programs); we were lucky we got there early, when the square was relatively empty, and the tourists still recovering. We pretty much had the square to ourselves, and headed for the old colonial church that marks it; the church dates from the 16th century.
The area around Villa has been settled for a long time. The combination of salubrious weather, and enough water from the mountain run off, has made it a desirable location even before the wealthy from Bogota scouted it out for summer homes (some of which are truly palatial).
We set out to visit four tourist spots, ranging from several hundred million years ago to the present. Working from the ancient—this area was part of a sea as the great continent broke apart. That accounts for the minerals here (salt among others), and fossils. Hence, one of the places we went to was a fossil museum. The centerpiece was a complete fossilized skeleton of a 36 foot “baby” seagoing dinosaur, a Kronosaurus. I’m glad I met him in this state; his teeth showed no signs of decay (no sugar in his diet), and his crocodile head made it clear who would win that battle. Interestingly (to me anyway), our guide said there were no restrictions on taking fossils from the country; human artifacts, however, can get you in a world of trouble. Not enough room for any of the sauras in my suitcase, except maybe a theo.
Closer to the present (maybe 1300-1500), I’ve mentioned the Muisca before, and they were here too. There are two sites locally—another lake (where humanity began)—but we went to an astronomical observatory. It’s fascinating how various peoples who depended on agriculture figured out how to take advantage of weather or predict it. From Cahokia to Stonehenge to the Temple of Heaven in China, they found a way to determine the solstices and the equinox. Here, there were lines of stones running east to west, and when the sun cast shadows in the right places, people knew it was time to plant or to harvest. That information kept emperors in power in China (if nature cooperated). The grounds also contained a tomb of a prominent woman (Muisca were matrilineal) with four men. Unfortunately for posterity, the tomb was looted, so only bones were left—and the buried tomb was on a north-south axis).
Third tour spot was a former Dominican monastery. It had been overrun by armies since Independence, and fell into disuse, but is now a museum, and well preserved. What I appreciated most about it was the information was in three languages—Spanish, English, and French (French?), and was pretty basic about what had been the purpose of the rooms.
Taking us to the present was a visit to a vineyard. Chile is the South American standard for wines, and when I saw the empty bottles had all come on pallets from Chile, I knew that this was primarily for tourists. The wine is distributed locally, but I had no desire to bring the first (and probably only) bottle of it back to Bloomington-Normal.
When we came back to the Bell Tower Inn where we are staying, I went back to the square. One of the museums I wanted to see was dedicated to religious art, and another museum was residence and collection of Luis Acuna, a prominent 20th century artist. I liked both the artist’s house and his paintings, which were part of the Bachue movement. He incorporated a lot of local themes in his art, including a mural depicting the origin of the human race a la Muisca. The explanation takes about half the brochure for the museum, which is to say it’s a large and complex story, and a large and complex mural.
Withal, an interesting day in Villa de Leyva.

Villa de Leyva January 3, 2018
The trip to this city took root over a year ago when, in Cartagena, I read in the Lonely Planet guidebook that Villa de Leyva was one of the best preserved colonial cities in South America. That and about $5 leftover Colombian pesos closed the deal for me.
It’s day three of our trip to inland Colombia, but we just arrived here in Villa de Leyva a few hours ago, having flown to Bogota and spent two nights there. A few observations on that capital city—of 7-10 million people on the savannah de Bacata, a plateau in the Andes that stretches several hundred miles (Bogota is at 4 degrees, 37 minutes north of the equator, at 8600 feet). The climate in Bogota is almost always the same, we were told; 66 during the day, 45 at night—only about a 75 degree difference from this week in Bloomington. That difference (the 10 degrees below in Bloomington) nearly cut short our trip by a day, since when we got to the airport Monday afternoon, I saw the dreaded “flight delayed” on the board, and a “We’ll do our best to reschedule your affected flights” email message. Fortunately for us, that delay coincided with a delay in Atlanta, which got us into Bogota on time.We spent a full day in Bogota, and a full day getting to Villa, and here’s a few thoughts to share:

1) The pre-Colombian past lives not just in museums, but in some of the ways Colombia has addressed its indigenous population—rather like the Canadians have (recently) discussed and treated the first nation. The biggest local tribe, the Muisca, has recently been reorganized, and one of the visits (a 2 mile hike to a sacred lake—at 10000 feet) was on tribal land. Our guide told us that the history of the country has been rewritten to separate the arrival of the Europeans from the arrival of the first nations. The Muisca in particular had a reverence for the outdoors, especially the sun, earth, moon, and water. In Bogota, one of the first things we did was take a funicular ride up to almost 9000 feet for an overlook of the city. This mountain was sacred, and represented the sun. Of course, because it was sacred to the Muisca, the Spanish,

who killed the last king of the tribe in the 16th century, built a church on it, and did the same on a neighboring hill, representing the moon.

The Muisca “coronated” kings in few area lakes (depending on the branch of the tribe). As I said, we went to one, which had a ceremonial house where the new king prepared for his “anointment” in the lake. On the specific day, he would go out on the water, and to give thanks for his people, deposit gold and emeralds (still two objects mined or found in Colombia) into the lake. Archeologists count 48 kings who went through the ceremony.

Being into shiny was one of the reasons for the Spanish conquest; the lake gave rise to the myth of an El Dorado of riches, but subsequent generations also sought the wealth supposedly beneath the waters. The Spanish tried in vain to drain the lake, as did more contemporary engineers. The government finally stepped in to preserve the lake, and entrance is now monitored and restricted.

The most impressive museum in Bogota (a city of contrasts; from the peak the guide showed us the old city, the centro, and the north—the economically well off; and then the south, which even from 9200 feet looked like favelas I’ve seen in Brazil and Chile, and townships in South Africa) housed the gold treasures that attracted the Spanish.

2) One of the consequences of Spanish rule is that Colombia is predominantly Catholic, and that’s reflected in a number of the churches we saw in Bogota, and on the way to Villa. The older churches in the capital reflect the wealth of the Church (the independence movement was not anti-clerical; that came much later), including several whose baroque interiors were byproducts of the wealth the new world gave to the old. Perhaps the most striking, however, was the “Cathedral of Salt.” Its origins were in the shrine at which miners prayed before going into the salt mines, or returned from them, thankful of surviving. When the original flooded in the 1990s, miners built a bigger one that was voted the “Number 1 Marvel in Colombia.” All underground, the entrance to the cathedral is via the Stations of the Cross, which ushers into a huge vaulted room that Pope Francis visited last year.

3) Colombian history has been politically troubled for hundreds of years. Bogota owes its settlement partly to the fertile savannah, but partly to the fact that it wasn’t on the ocean; the wealth of Cartagena of the Indies attracted pirates and the Dutch, French, and English who saw looting as a short cut to riches.The turbulence in 20th century Colombia has contributed to the paucity of colonial-era buildings in Bogota. In 1948, a left-leaning presidential candidate was assassinated (think CIA?), which led to riots resulting in hundreds of homes being burned, and thousands of people killed. More recently, in the 1990s, one of the militant parties (the recent truce lured the FARC into running for government in return for turning in their arms; FARC was the last major anti-government force) seized the Judiciary building, along with hostages. The army besieged the building, with over 100 dead, including most judges, and the building had to be replaced.

Not all the violence has been counterproductive, and it has been interesting to follow the career of “The Liberator,” Simon Bolivar. I saw

where he died, in Santa Marta, last year. This time, we visited the Quinta de Bolivar, a house given to him, which contained a replica of his sword (the M-19, one of the anti-government groups stole it in the 90s, and the recovered original is in the archives; a copy is in the Quinta).

While the center of Bogota is the Plaza de Bolivar, perhaps the most moving place for me was on our way here—the site of the Battle of Boyaca. Fought on August 7, 1819, it marked the end of the war for Independence.

Colombia  was the result of an almost a 10 year war, one that began in Bogota

supposedly when a pure-blood Spaniard refused to give a vase to a Colombian-born Spaniard (such were the distinctions made in 1810 when the government in exile—Napoleon’s brother was elevated to the throne–tried to rule the new world). The broken vase supposedly ignited the revolution; it’s in the museum of independence which I also visited.

The political structure that Bolivar sought to build—rather like the European union of the five countries—collapsed in the politics and past history and personalities of his generals and the countries concerned. Colombia itself has had trouble balancing centralization and federalism. Villa de Leyva faces the geographical diversity that is Colombia—forest, jungle, desert, etc. I look forward to seeing it in daylight. That’s for tomorrow.