The landscapes of Antioquia, the department surrounding Medellin, are renowned as some of the most beautiful in Colombia, so for our final day here we join a group tour heading to two of eastern Antioquia’s most popular sights; the giant rock El Peñol and the neighbouring town of Guatape, with its uniquely decorated buildings. It’s a bus tour departing from Parque El Poblado at 7am so slightly tired and in need of coffee we arrive to have names checked off the list and be welcomed on board by tour leaders Alejandro and Sergio.
Alejandro is gruff but efficient, permanently clad in dark glasses and speaks Spanish in a deep but easily understood monotone, calling us all “chicos” with every other sentence. Sergio is the guide for English speakers and is very young and camp as Christmas, delivering his welcome speech as though he’s accepting an Oscar. He tells us today is his first anniversary of becoming a tour guide and he wants to spread good vibes and to show us that we can make all our dreams a reality. He learned English by reading dictionaries and watching the likes of The Crown and Downtown Abbey. Bless him… but his relentless enthusiasm and habit of repeating himself over and over again quickly wears thin.
We head east on the highway that runs all the way to Bogotá (a drive of ten hours) but turn off after about sixty minutes at the town of Maranilla, which is famous both for its traditional folk music and for being incredibly Catholic, even hosting an annual religious music festival featuring lots of Gregorian chanting. It’s also the start of farming country, producing tomatoes, lettuce, onion, garlic and coffee, and as the bus winds its way past gorgeous tracts of agricultural planting we see lots of little independent farms dotted throughout the permanently undulating landscape.
By 9am we get to the new town of Peñol, which was built in just twelve months between 1977 and 1978 to replace the old village of Peñol. That historic village was flooded, along with 6200 hectares of land, to make way for the second biggest hydro electric dam in Colombia. The displaced villagers were offered homes in the new town built higher up the hillsides.
Towering in the distance looms a huge rocky mound, like a mini Sugar Loaf Mountain, comprised of granite, quartz and crystal. It’s an ancient remnant of a volcanic explosion and at 220 metres tall it’s strange and impressive and promises spectacular views over the flooded landscape dotted with newly formed islands. The only problem is that to ascend it you have to climb 748 steps to the highest lookout at its summit.
The whole rock is privately owned, from before the land was flooded, and we’re told the family whose grandfather bought it are now so rich that they even own a couple of helicopters built by Rolls Royce. Their wealth comes from the canny decision they made to turn it into a tourist attraction which is now one of Colombia’s must-see sights.
The thousands of visitors each day park in the family’s fee-paying car park and make their way through the hundreds of souvenirs stalls and cafes which line the route, and are all leased from the family, to the ticket barriers at the bottom of the snaking staircase the family built to ascend the rock, on top of which are even more shops and bars.
It’s a pretty cloudy morning when we arrive but the views once we’ve climbed to the very top are still (literally) breathtaking. The lake is laid out before us in all directions and it’s extremely pretty, its more than two million cubic metres of water renewably providing more than 10% of Colombia’s electricity, even if it did submerge huge areas of land in the process. There’s even a statue of grandpapa, Luis Eduardo Villegas López, and sure enough a helipad to accommodate wealthy visitors who don’t want to climb the steps.
By the time we descend to the bottom once more, lots of other coach parties have arrived and the queues for tickets are growing by the second so Sergio and Alejandro, along with coach driver Cesar, ensure we steal a march on them all by whisking us straight to Guatape where we are given life jackets and take seats on a boat to tour the lake. It’s a very tranquil experience as we glide across the surface watching the beautiful landscape pass by.
We get great views of El Peñol from the water and also pass by La Manuela Hacienda, Pablo Escobar’s ruined holiday home. It was a huge lakefront country estate with helipads, swimming pools, a discotheque and more, where Escobar reputedly stashed millions of dollars of cash in the walls as his own private bank. The house was blown up in 1993 by the rival Cali cartel eight months before Escobar himself was finally killed, and has been abandoned ever since. Tourists used to be able to take tours of it but that has now been prohibited in an attempt to stop the glorification of a man most Colombians despise.
As we sail back towards Guatape a speedboat approaches and a man in a panama hat comes on board. Alejandro introduces him as a singer called Dani Garcia who is going to entertain us with a traditional Antioquían style song which involves him improvising a verse based on where everyone on board has come from. When he gets to us I tell him London, but he thinks a guy sat beside us is with Coman and myself and sings about “tres caballeros” naming us as Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin and Mr Bean!
A group lunch at a basic restaurant called San Juan del Puerto follows before Sergio leads us on a walking tour of the town. A small village, with traditional houses constructed of sand, mud and wood that used to erode quickly in the humidity, in 1919 during Holy Week a local woman decorated her house with a frieze depicting a lamb, and painted it in multicolours. Somehow the frieze miraculously helped the building regulate its temperature and protected the house from eroding. Soon all the inhabitants did the same, with idiosyncratic friezes that came to be called ‘zocalos’, and now the entire town is brightly painted and uniquely decorated with frescos.
At its heart is a beautiful church and pretty plaza and the town is now full of souvenir shops and restaurants, deriving almost 100% of its income from tourism. So it’s not just the canny grandpa of El Peñol who knew how to create a visitor attraction. The residents of Guatape, in its shadow, have done the same, and how! The streets are almost impassable with coach parties like us wandering around.
We take our leave of Sergio and our fellow travellers as soon as we can and find beautiful back streets less crowded where we can take photos unimpeded. Nevertheless as tourists we get slightly fleeced at a cafe where a couple of frappuccino’s, a small bag of coffee and a little bar of chocolate cost us well over £20!
We savour every bite of that chocolate when we get back to Medellin, packing our bags to leave the city tomorrow and head south in search of new adventures.
