Everywhere you look in Villa de Leyva it's amazingly beautiful! The mountainside is lush green, the streets are paved with stones of all colors polished over time by many visitors and residents alike, the colonial buildings have been painstakingly conserved and flowers are in bloom in baskets, on trees and pouring over walls at each turn we make. It's so lovely and well-preserved that it's no wonder there is a novela (latin soap opera) being filmed here with hundreds of actors in costumes waiting around for their turn to step before the camera or walking the cobbled streets being tourists themselves.
We arrived at the Colombian Highlands Hostel in the early afternoon and after dropping off our packs we went down to the center to see what all the travel guide fuss was about. It didn't take long to fall for Villa! However dark clouds opened up and the rain was beginning by the time we returned home. It poured all night which made the air fresh for our long day of looking around the area today.
This is the view outside our room~
One of the 'miracles' of traveling came our way today when we were approached by Mike Manning who was our wonderful tour guide/party chef from our first days in Medellin at the Art House. He has been to the Amazon, Bogota, back to Medellin and now is making his way along the heartland trail of Colombia. We were so excited to see him again and at his suggestion engaged a taxi driver for the day to take us outside the small city to see the nearby, though hard to reach, sights.
Our three hour journey included a variety of interesting sights including Monasterio de Santo Ecce Homo which was first constructed in mid 16th century and recently reconstructed in the later part of the last century. The courtyard's garden was in full bloom and very lovely. We each took our own self-guided tours through the rooms and into the chapel before jumping back into the taxi.
Stop #2 was remarkably different from the first attraction. Parque Arqueologico de Monquira is about 2200 years old, a Pre-Colombian spiritual site filled with phallic symbols and Colombia's own small "Stonehenge".
The area is also rich in fossil remains and we visited a paleontology site with a reasonably complete kronosaurus fossil, a 120-million-year-old prehistoric marine reptile resembling an overgrown crocodile. The fossil is 7m long (the animal was about 12m long but its tail hasn't survived). It's a baby kronosaurus (the adult animals were far larger) and it remains in the place where it was found. The museum was filled with fossils of all kinds.
Our last stop was a series of small deep pools of blueish-green water, the tint comes from the various minerals, including copper, dissolved in the water. We walked around the seven ponds before returning back to town.
We had a great day!
No comments:
Post a Comment