Sep '06 - Dec '09
A few images from my holiday visit to La Sabana de Bogotá, a large plateau 2,600 meters high up on the eastern cordillera of the Colombian Andes. La Sabana's most famous city is Bogotá, although it is home to a lot of smaller cities.
1 - Bogotá
These images are sadly almost exclusively from the relatively wealthy northern side of the city. This is important to note, I think, because they are missing one of the most interesting and striking things about the city, the culturally enforced difference between the social classes (some sociologists even compare it to a cast system) and the different urban conditions that divide creates.
From the top:
-Brick housing complex
-Construction site / The city from the mountains
-Bulevar Niza, the second mall in Bogotá, which I like for its urban place-making characteristics. This is close to where I lived when I was a child, and at the time basically the northern edge of the city. Every time I go back Bogotá gets more and more suburban with Carrefour and other Wal-Mart like stores taking over the more traditional and better planned shopping areas and pushing the city out to what used to be the farm lands.
-The eastern edge of the city, looking out into the hills settled by squatter communities.
2-Images from a trip around La Sabana de Bogotá.
3-Facatativa (better known as Faca) is a city at the edge of La Sabana where a lot of my family lives. Here we are going from the Central Plaza (as Bogotá this is a city laid out according to the laws of the indies) to the suburbs.
4-Finally, I leave you with the pride of Faca, the archeological park of Las Piedras del Tunjo (The Stones of the Chief), an indigenous site where the Tunjo (Chief) of the native Muisca tribe once ruled.
7 Comments
Way back in the day, I went with my family to Bogotá, Barranquilla, and (I seem to remember) Aracataca. Lovely country. Although my roots lie in Mexico and Puerto Rico, I harbor this secret wish to live in South America.
beautiful.
those rock formations (natural) are amazing....gosh....I miss home (costa rica); those images of the small town streets with fruit stands is what I grew up seeing.
Smoke, I guess your parents are GG Marquez fans, I would love to one day take the boat ride GGM took before writing One Hundred Years of Solitude from Barranquilla to Aracataca (Macondo).
Thanks AP
squirrelly, you are right, I have lived most of my life in the US, but going to la sabana always feels like going home. One day if I can convince my wife...
no q. no moving to Colombia.
this country desperately needs you (and others like you, which, as it happens, I like to consider myself..;.)
That's right q+ ... my parents bought me a copy of 100 Years on a family trip to Epcot Center back in 1985.
reminds me of Mexico city and Teohotican
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