San Agustín Archaeological Park
UNESCO-listed burial landscape in the Colombian Massif, with hundreds of carved stone figures.
Spread across the foothills of the Colombian Massif in southern Huila, the San Agustín complex holds the largest group of megalithic funerary sculpture in South America. Stone figures, burial mounds, terraces and slab-lined tombs were made by societies that occupied the upper Magdalena valley over many centuries; most of the surviving carving is dated between roughly the first and eighth centuries AD, although the chronology remains debated. The main park alone contains several hundred statues, and remains are scattered over a far wider area.
Visitors follow paths between four mesitas, or artificial mounds, where guardian figures with bared teeth and animal features stand beside the entrances to tombs. Other highlights include the Bosque de las Estatuas, a woodland walk lining up sculptures brought from nearby sites, and the Fuente de Lavapatas, a stream bed carved with channels, basins and reliefs of serpents and lizards. The park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995 together with the separate sites of Alto de los Ídolos and Alto de las Piedras near Isnos.
Highlights
- Hundreds of megalithic statues, some more than four metres tall
- Four mesitas with burial mounds, slab tombs and guardian figures
- Fuente de Lavapatas, a stream bed carved with channels and reliefs
- Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995
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