Tierradentro – More Exercise Than You’d Think You´d Get

Really, we did it in the wrong direction, although we didn’t know it at the time.  There are a couple of archeological sites that are apparently very worth seeing en route to Ecuador: San Agustin and Tierradentro.  And if you look at a map, Tierradentro looks best to visit first.  So that was what we did.

To see Tierradentro Archeological Park you need to stay in San Andres de Pisimbala, a small village that dwindles out just at the entrance to the park.  And when I say small, I mean absolutely tiny.  At its most populated, the village comprises of about three streets, half of one of which is paved, and holds apparently about eight hundred people, but it looks more like half that.  It does, however, have an astonishingly beautiful colonial church, half white stone and half thatched roof, which a guide could only tell me was built around the sixteenth hundreds.  One of the really nice things about San Andres is that if you go out for a beer in the evening, you’ll be sitting on somebody’s front porch getting a good view of the stars which shine so brightly in the almost complete absence of streets lights and when you try to pay at the end the owner will wave away the suggestion, insisting, “Oh, tomorrow”.

The park itself is spread over many peaks and troughs in the mountainous countyside which forms the gorgeous backdrop to San Andres.  It comprises several sites of tombs which were dug deep into the earth nearly three thousand years ago.  These tombs are usually pillared affairs with much decoration drawn onto the walls in black, red and white (representing death, life and the afterlife respectively).  These paintings have been preserved amazingly well under the ground all this time, and include geometric patterns and masked faces.

And we spent all day walking between each site, and climbing in and out of the tombs.  They are covered over, locked and guarded, although the ceramics and jewellery and so forth have long since been moved to the two museums of the park.  It was hard work; the tombs go down to about six metres at the deepest, and the deeper the cave, the more important the person or family buried there.  And the steps into it are about a metre high themselves.  Apparently this was to make it harder to get in there, and it worked.  I can’t imagine how these people, who were, let’s not forget, tiny little people, much as they still are today around here, ever got themselves down there, let alone bodies and decorations.

Next to nothing is known about the indigenous tribes which once lived here; archeologists extrapolate from the little evidence they have and comparisons with surviving indigenous peoples, whom are numerous in this part of Colombia.  But the lack of knowledge of these ancient peoples is hardly surprising; even now, we still discover the odd tribe living deep in the Amazon that we previously had no clue about.  Anyone remember this?  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7027254.stm  They´ve changed the picture on it, but at the time the photos of the tribe were included, with the women painted red and the men painted black, and they were pointing overhead at the camera.  I remember wondering at the time what on earth those people thought when they saw the helicopter or whatever hovering over their heads.  I imagine we just gave them new gods.  There have always been and still are thousands of tribal peoples in this area of the world; it’s hard to obtain information about the ones which are long gone.

Sophie Carville