San Agustín Archaeological Park

Six hundred stone guardians, and nobody knows who carved them

In the upper valley of the Magdalena River in Huila, Colombia, stands the largest collection of religious monuments and megalithic sculpture in Latin America, often called the largest necropolis in the world: more than 600 statues guarding graves across the plateaus on either side of the canyon. They were carved, it is thought, between about AD 5 and 400, and who carved them is a mystery, since most of the ground has never been excavated. The figures have short legs and faces human, animal or both, jaguars, bats and crocodiles among them, and some stand as guardians over the burial mounds; the tallest, at the Alto de los Ídolos, is 7 metres. They were once painted yellow, red, black and white, and a few still carry colour. A Spanish friar, Juan de Santa Gertrudis, described them in 1756. In 1913 a German ethnologist took 21 smaller sculptures to Berlin, and Colombia has asked for them back. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995.