The roads in Colombia aren’t all that bad but they all go up and down hills and curve incessantly as they pass through the hills and mountain sides. That’s why it takes 11 hours and 320 miles to drive from Bogotá to Medellin and why it took us over two hours to go 50 miles to reach the town of Guatapé and Lake Embalse El Peñol-Guatapé. Speed bumps every 100 meters. And Colombian drivers take no prisoners. And motorcyclists? Don’t get me started. But Colombian chaos seems to work well. Everyone knows what to expect.
The ride was through Medellin’s 5 mile/$30 tunnel, past the airport in Rionegro and then through the mostly agricultural country. There was a fair amount of industrial business too. This region to the east of Medellin is the city’s main supplier of fruits and vegetables.
The town of Guatapé is a retreat for wealthy Medellinistas, being only 15 minutes by helicopter. There’s even a hotel accessible only by helicopter. Columbia’s two biggest fútbol (soccer) players are building a hotel here. And they do a pretty good tourist trade too. Pedro Escobar had a villa here until the rival Cali cartel blew it up. A villa he built for his daughter still stands.
Incidentally, Escobar’s son never got into the family business and disavows his father’s behavior. Some would call Escobar a Robinhood. His son, and Lina, strongly disagree.
Guatapé is located on the shores of Lake Embalse El Peñol-Guatapé, an artificial lake built as a hydroponic project. It supplies 30% of Colombia’s power needs. Columbia sells power generated here to Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Panama. There’s a new project due to come on line soon with four times the generating power. Guatapé will be decommissioned leaving nothing but recreation – not a total loss to be sure.
The flooding to form the lake took almost 20 years beginning with the original idea in 1960 to flooding in 1978. Residents of the town of Peñol, led by the parish priest, blocked the project until remuneration and new housing could be negotiated. The new town, Peñol, is a collection of nondescript high rise apartment buildings, far from the pastoral setting of their old town. Progress has its victims, here or at the Three Gorges Dam in China where displaced people live far above the Yangtze river, or Stalin’s waterway from Moscow to St. Petersburg where the top of a church steeple sticks out of the water in the middle of the river.
A tidbit of folklore: A local priest was visited in his dreams by an angel who warned that Peñol would be attacked by a blue dragon. Fifty years later the dream came true. See the picture of a map of the lake, shaped like a dragon, just like Moosehead Lake is shaped after its namesake.
The town of Guatapé sports a number of Spanish-era buildings, unlike Bogotá and Medellin where most of the old has given way to the new. Lina, our guide, is apologetic but I think Colombia and other Spanish-conquered lands should create their own identity. Maybe lack of Spanish cathedrals and whatnot is bad for the tourist business however. “New” Colombia isn’t as picturesque as Spanish cathedrals.
But Guatapé is colorful, with artwork on the bottom meter or so of many houses: zócalos, panels that depict something of the homeowner’s life. There’s some graffiti art, too but the zócolos are more restrained albeit equally colorful.
The other major attraction here is the granite monolith called El Peńon de Guapé or La Piedra or, if you’re from Peñol, La Piedra de Peñol. It’s an imposing piece of rock with stairs leading up its side to an observation deck and snack bar. It looked like a hard climb to me from a distance but Lina says she’s taken an 85-year-old up in about 25 minutes.
We took an hour’s boat trip on the lake, had a nice lunch at a restaurant with great views, stopped for a group photo in front of La Piedra and then hit the road for the airport.
We won’t get to Cartagena until 9 PM where a buffet dinner awaits us. On the road in the morning at 7:45 AM to visit the city’s iconic fortress before the worst of the heat and humidity take over.
