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Morning: strolled around through a serious flea market...
Medellin, music.MOV... and strolled on to the Plazoleta de las Esculturas to check out the many fat Fernando Botero sculptures:
Botero is perhaps the most famous citizen of Medellin. His sculptures are in several museums and parks, including the Parque San Antonio, with his Pájaro de Paz (Bird of Peace):
It sits alongside its original version, which was destroyed in a terrorist bomb attack. The damage was done by a nail bomb packed with ten kilos of dynamite, set off under it at a concert in 1995, killing 23 people. The perpetrators may have been the drug cartels. Botero asked that the mangled original be left in place in homage to the victims and as a protest against violence:
The nearby Museo de Antioquia has lots of his sculptures, paintings. and drawings, including his Death of Pablo Escobar.
Pablo Escobar Gaviria – the most famous of Colombia’s cocaine barons. A high-school dropout from a relatively middle-class background, Escobar began his career stealing marble gravestones, which he then sanded down and resold. He gained a foothold in the cocaine trade as the drug took off in US popularity in the mid-1970s. By 1982, he had a well-established smuggling operation, just in time for the huge boost in the market caused by the rise of crack. By the mid-1980s, Colombia was shipping 70–80 tons of powder to the US every month, and eighty percent of the trade was in the hands of Escobar’s Medellín Cartel. He was shot in 1993, on a rooftop in Medellin, as depicted by Boltero’s painting above.
I feel uncomfortable bringing up this sad period in Colombia’s history - sad for my country, too. But it is an important part of our two country’s pasts, and we must not forget it.
Since Escobar’s death, a couple of tours sprang up taking tourists around the city to various Escobar-associated sights. You got to see the building he lived in, apartment blocks he had built, the rooftop on which he was shot, and, finally, his gravestone. I did not go on any tour.
Another floor of the Museo de Antioquia had some very fine pre-Hispanic pieces, which I really love, they are so imaginative (and sometimes even amusing):
In the Parque Berrío, the Monumento a la Raza is Rodrigo Arenas Betancur's most impressive work. It tells the story of Antioquia in dramatically twisting metal (I couldn’t fit it all in one photo).
I liked the originality of the Catedral Metropolitana at the northern end of Parque Bolívar, the largest church in the world that’s built entirely of bricks – 1.12 million (You can trust me - I counted them).
A break for coffee at Salon Malaga, a tango and bolero bar before heading home.
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