740 steps up a stone

Two hours east of Medellín, in the middle of a green landscape, stands a stone. Not a crag in a ridge, not a hill with a rock face. One piece of granite, two hundred metres high, sticking out of the countryside like a fist.

It is called the Piedra del Peñol, or the Peñón de Guatapé, depending on who you ask, and that "depending on who" is half the story.

How it got there

The rock is the remnant of an igneous body known as the Antioquia batholith. The stone formed tens of millions of years ago deep underground and stayed standing when rain and time carried away the softer ground around it. The indigenous people of the region treated it as a sacred place.

For a long time nobody climbed it, because the walls are smooth and steep. Then in July 1954 a local man, Luis Eduardo Villegas López, tried it with two neighbours. The story goes that the parish priest provoked them by remarking that toads do not climb stones. They went up on planks nailed into the vertical crack and it took them five days.

The wooden stairs lasted until 1970, when concrete ones replaced them, and those are still there.

GI

A huge GI is painted on the face and nobody ever finished it. It was meant to read GUATAPÉ, but the neighbouring town of El Peñol objected that the rock was theirs, and the painting stopped at the second letter.

The argument over whose rock it is has never ended. It is silly and it is funny, but it is about money: hundreds of thousands of people climb it every year.

740 steps

The top step has 740 painted on it. Counted out, there are about 715 concrete steps, plus a few dozen more up the viewing tower at the top. The climb is a little over two hundred metres.

You go up one staircase and down another, narrower one. The steps vary in height, the railing is made of tubes, in places there is one and in places there is not, and in some spots the drop starts right next to it.

The safety officer in me was working out how many people pass each other on half a metre of width. With forty coming up and twenty coming down, this is a place where nothing would move at home without a double handrail and a net. Here you hold on and walk.

Going up is fine. Coming down is worse: the steps are high, your knees notice, and you are looking ahead and down at the same time.

At the top

At the top there is a tower, a restaurant, stalls and a view through a hundred and eighty degrees.

That view is worth the 740 steps. Below you the lake breaks into a hundred inlets and islands, the green ends in water, and among it all are peninsulas with houses and a boat at the shore. In the distance a forest was burning and the smoke lay over the water in a band.

I had a coconut ice cream and it was the best ice cream I have eaten in Colombia.

Gallinazos

Black birds circle the rock with their wings spread, barely moving. They are black vultures, gallinazos here, and anybody who has seen them over a city bin thinks of them as scavengers. Above this rock they look different.

The wall generates an updraught, they lay themselves into it and glide without a single wingbeat, ten metres below you, over the water. Photographing that took longer than the climb.

What I did not like

The rock has been turned into a funfair. Below the steps there is an Eiffel tower made of tubes, a giant statue, inflatable rides, hundreds of stalls selling the same goods and marked spots for your photo.

I understand that people live off it. But it takes something away: a stone that stood here before the first human walked past has an amusement park at its foot.

It is better at the top. Turn your back on the restaurant and look at the water, and it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.