Town · Colombia · 1925 m a.s.l.
Guatapé
Ajiaco with rice, avocado, an arepa and hogao sauce. Guatapé, by the water.
A small town on the shore of the reservoir, two hours east of Medellín. It is known for its zócalos, painted reliefs in a band along the base of the facades, and for the colourful houses that grew up around them.
The main square has a white church with red edges, a short walk away is the Calle del Recuerdo with umbrellas overhead, and down at the water there is a promenade full of boats.
It is pretty and there is a lot of it. It is also a place where tourism became a trade: the ground floors are souvenir shops, there are two sets of prices, and anybody arriving on a Saturday afternoon walks in a crowd.
It is at its best on the water. A boat rounds the inlets and islands and comes back below the rock, from where you see Guatapé from the other side.
A bit of history
Until the 1970s Guatapé was an ordinary farming town. Two things changed it.
The first is the habit of painting zócalos. The band along the bottom of a wall was originally there to protect the render from damp and from livestock. Around 1920 a local man, José María Parra Jiménez, painted sheep onto his, and the others joined in: a baker had bread on his wall, a farmer had his animals. Protecting a wall turned into telling the story of the house, and that turned into the town's trademark.
The second is the reservoir. Empresas Públicas de Medellín began filling it in 1970 and finished in 1979. The water covered fields, farms and the whole town of El Peñol, which had to be rebuilt somewhere else. Thousands of people moved, the church stayed under the surface, and when the water is low a cross still rises from the spot where the altar stood.
Guatapé lost farmland and gained a shoreline. The tourism, the boats and the hotels it lives on today sit on the bottom of that story, and the museum and the replica of the old Peñol do not hide it.
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