The most important sites are the Archaeological Park, three kilometers from the city of San Agustin (alt. 1,730 m avg. temp. 18 °C), the Chaquira, on the rocks overlooking the canyon of the river gorge, and Alto de Los Idolos, the shaman cemetery, 26 kilometers north of the city.
The Archaeological Park is the site where the largest number of statues are preserved. It consists of four earthen mounds built in the jungle, Le Mesitas, burial mounds that covered some tombs and on which the statues stand, created to protect the deceased and not to be visible or admired.
Among these hills, an enigmatic people whose first traces date back to 3000 BC left behind the largest open-air museum in South America: over 500 statues, engravings, tombs, and sarcophagi located in the middle of the jungle, on cleared terraces, on giant rocks, and hilltops.
Many of these statues range from one to six meters high, weigh more than a ton, and represent duality in all its forms: light and shadow, sun and moon, life and death.
We are in the department of Huila, in the southwestern area of Colombia, in an archaeological complex of 500 square kilometers centered in the city of San Agustin. Here, between the 5th and 11th centuries AD, a civilization of tribes dedicated to agriculture, hunting, and fishing gave rise to a culture animated by jaguar priests, human sacrifices, and mythical animals, before mysteriously disappearing before the arrival of European colonists. Each tribe was led by shamans whose tombs were found to contain funerary gifts, gold, and ceramics, much of which was looted during the 19th and 20th centuries.
The statues were guardians of the dead, their tombs, and sarcophagi. They are anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures, but there are also unreal images, such as masks of monsters and hybrid beings.
Farmers, warriors, women with children, and sacred animals such as the jaguar, frog, snake, monkey, and eagle. Enclosed in these sculptures are the secrets of the San Agustin civilization. The statues almost all face east, in honor of the Sun God, are gray and two-dimensional, appear to be made of concrete, but are actually volcanic stone and were once painted yellow, red, black, and white. Most are scattered across the 78 hectares of the San Agustin Archaeological Park, three kilometers from the city.
The ancient people had built villages of huts of which almost nothing remains today on the large meadows surrounding the Mesitas. From Mesitas C, the farthest from the entrance, a descending path surrounded by a tunnel of dense vegetation leads to the most important ceremonial site in the park and perhaps to the most complex sculpture in the entire archaeological circuit: La Fuente de Lavapatas (footwash), where religious ceremonies and ritual baths took place.
Here, on the bed of the Lavapatas stream, figures of snakes, lizards, salamanders, faces, and human shapes have been carved into the rock, channeling water into a labyrinth of streams and small basins. From the Fuente de Lavapatas, the road climbs steeply through the jungle on the hillside until reaching another very important place in the park: Alto del Lavapatas, the highest point in the area.
A green clearing artfully built by the ancient vanished civilization from which you can admire the entire 360-degree landscape and where one of the park’s most enigmatic statues is located: the Doble Io (double self), a representation of an Idol with a monkey with a semi-human face crouched on its head, guarding several tombs.
Before concluding the park visit, one must walk the “Statue Path,” a solitary trail that penetrates the jungle with thirty-five statues arranged along its sides, collected from various locations. Among these, the most famous are the farmer – depicting a man holding two agricultural tools – and the warrior.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, tombs and sarcophagi were repeatedly looted, and aside from gold and ceramics, very important human remains for a more thorough historical investigation into the origins and the demise of the mysterious San Agustin civilization were dispersed. The causes of this “stone people’s” disappearance are unknown. Perhaps the influence of the Inca Empire, which extended from Peru to the south of present-day Colombia, was the main cause of this decline.
