San Agustin archeological park
Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The Fuente de Lavapatas is a network of channels cut into the rock of a stream bed, carved with human, amphibian and reptile figures.
- Archaeologists found Lavapatas only in 1937 and date the carved stream bed to roughly the 1st to 9th centuries AD.
- Many statues still stand exactly where they were found, and a large share of them face east.
- Konrad Theodor Preuss was the first to photograph the sculptures, documenting 120 statues during his 1913–1914 expedition.
- In 1859 cinchona-bark traders hauled three statues and a large stone sarcophagus into the town of San Agustín.
- In 1907 two of the sculptures were sent to Bogotá, where they were set up in the city's Parque Nacional.
- One of the best-known sculptures shows a bird of prey, probably an eagle or owl, gripping a snake in its beak.
- Friar Juan de Santa Gertrudis took one figure for a priest whose right arm had been cut off to strip him of his ornaments.
- The Forest of Statues is a woodland trail lined with 35 funerary sculptures gathered from the surrounding area.
- Human presence in the region reaches back to about 3000 BC, the age of a hearth left by a pre-ceramic culture.
Why it is worth it
In the green hills around the headwaters of the Magdalena River in southern Colombia, hundreds of stone figures stand guard over ancient tombs. San Agustín holds the largest group of religious monuments and megalithic sculpture in Latin America: more than 600 statues are known from the region, carved by a people whose name and language are unknown. Most are thought to date from roughly the first four centuries AD, though the chronology remains uncertain because much of the area has never been excavated.
The statues range from small carvings to monumental figures. Many combine human and animal traits, with jaguars, crocodiles and bats among the creatures depicted, and they were once painted in red, yellow, black and white; traces of colour survive on a few. Most stood at the entrances of burial mounds and stone-slab tombs, and archaeologists read them as guardians of the dead; around the larger burial mounds, fiercer figures of snakes, frogs and birds keep watch. The tallest statue, at about seven metres, stands at the Alto de los Ídolos.
The Spanish friar Juan de Santa Gertrudis described the statues in the 1750s, and in 1913 the German ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuss excavated here and shipped 21 smaller sculptures to Berlin; Colombia has since asked for their return. The main park near the town of San Agustín and two outlying sites near Isnos, Alto de los Ídolos and Alto de las Piedras, were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. The remains are spread over more than 300 square kilometres on plateaus on both sides of the Magdalena canyon.
The sites are spread out, so plan on more than one day: the main park near San Agustín town, with the Fuente de Lavapatas and the Alto de Lavapatas among its sectors, and the two sites in the municipality of Isnos, a separate excursion by road.
Getting there
The main park lies just outside San Agustín, in Huila Department; the Alto de los Ídolos is about 4 km and the Alto de las Piedras about 7 km from the town of Isnos. The nearest airport is at Pitalito (PTX), about 30 km or 40 minutes by car from San Agustín, with flights from Bogotá. Popayán's Guillermo León Valencia Airport (PPN) is about 72 km away in a straight line but around four and a half hours by road.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The San Agustín Archaeological Park is a large archaeological area located near the town of San Agustín in Huila Department in Colombia. The park contains the largest collection of religious monuments and megalithic sculptures in Latin America and is considered the world's largest necropolis. Belonging to the San Agustin culture, it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. The dates of the statues are uncertain, but they are believed to have been carved between 5–400 AD. The origin of the carvers remains a mystery, as the site is largely unexcavated.
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