Guatapé
The most popular day trip from Medellín is Guatapé.
Guatapé is a colorful little town next to a massive reservoir of the same name.
Every inch of the center of town is painted bright colors and everything is clearly made for tourism. There is an Instagrammable umbrella street, brightly painted tuktuks to get around and every shop is just as colorful. I found a shop that had delicious guanabana popsicles and another with good coffee. If you want coffee, go to La Viña, which has the best coffee in town. It was fabulous.
Guatapé is Instagrammable
Every inch of that little town is made for people to take photos for social media.
Guatapé church
In an odd quirk of history, the number 4 on the Guatapé church is wrong.
Guatapé is most famous for a giant rock.
It’s now painted with a capital letter G and the beginnings of the letter U. Somebody thought it would be a good idea to paint the word Guatapé on the rock, but were stopped after they got through the first letter and a half. Unfortunately, it’s apparently too hard to get the paint off and they’re stuck with it.
The approach
If you get there and decide you don’t want to walk up the stairs, you can always buy souvenirs and eat popsicles.
The whole place is the worst kind of tourist trap now. My bus dropped me off on the far end of a massive parking lot. I crossed the parking lot and stood in line to buy a ticket to go to the top of the rock. (The ticket was 25,000 COP, about $6 USD). After that I stood in another long line inching up the stairs to the top of the rock. At the top, there are cafés and souvenir shops and more places to spend money.
The reward
I was tempted by the Pay de Limón just to see if it tasted like lime pie, but couldn’t pass up the guanabana and kiwi combo.
I took a few photos and stood in line to go back down the stairs. Like all good tourist traps, you exit through the gift shop. I went down to a place I’d seen with gourmet popsicles on the edge of the parking lot. I got a guanabana and kiwi popsicle and sat with a view of the reservoir, which was definitely better than the top of the rock.
What are now islands used to be hilltops, before the hydroelectric dam and reservoir.
It wasn’t always a tourist trap.
The Indigenous Tahamí people, who inhabited the region before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, revered the rock as a sacred site and considered it a place of spiritual significance. According to Tahamí beliefs, the rock was created by the god Aruví, who threw lightning bolts to split the earth and form the towering monolith.
One of the many things flooded when the reservoir was made was the town of Peñol. The townspeople demanded that their town be rebuilt nearby and also demanded that the cross on the top of their church stick up above the new water level.
The last stop on my day was a boat tour.
It was a three-story boat that could have easily held 200 people though I think we had much less. It was a weekday, after all. Oddly, the boat went about 20 minutes to the ruins of a former Pablo Escobar mansion, then drove back. We did pass the cross from the top of the Peñol church, but didn’t see anything else of note.
All tours will take you to the town of Guatapé, the reservoir and the giant rock that looms above the reservoir. Some tours will take you on boats out on the reservoir and some include hiking on an island as part of the boat trip.
Not all Guatapé tours are created equal!
Check the details of the itinerary before you choose a tour. Group sizes vary, and the smaller the group, the better. I accepted a free tour, which is one of the ways I manage to travel so much. Consequently, I didn’t bother to check the itinerary or group size. (From now on, even if it’s free, I’m going through the details and the fine print before I agree to go).
I ended up on a full size bus that had about forty people on board. We were herded around like sheep from one shop to the next, where we were offered free samples of drinks and sweets and such. I never felt pressured to buy stuff, but it was still too cheesy for my taste.
The guide was very nice but clearly inexperienced, or perhaps just bored. He recited all the basics of the history of the place but didn’t have any interesting of the anecdotes or insider information that I’m used to from local guides.
