The most important 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 river canyon gorge, and the Alto des Los Idolos, the shaman cemetery, 26 kilometers north of the city.
The Archaeological Park is the site where the greatest number of statues are preserved. It consists of four terraces built in the middle of the jungle, Le Mesitas, funerary mounds that covered some tombs and on which the statues stand, created to protect the deceased and not to be visible and 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 gigantic rocks, and on hilltops.
Many of these statues range from one to six meters in height, 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 zone 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, only to mysteriously disappear before the arrival of European settlers. At the head of each tribe were the shamans, in whose tombs funerary gifts, gold, and ceramics were found, largely looted during the 19th and 20th centuries.
The statues were guardians of the deceased, their tombs, and their 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 then sacred animals like the jaguar, frog, snake, monkey, and eagle. The secrets of the San Agustin civilization are enclosed in those sculptures. Almost all the statues face east, in honor of the Sun God; they are gray and two-dimensional, seem made of cement, but are actually volcanic stone and were once colored yellow, red, black, and white. Most are scattered over 78 hectares of the San Agustin Archaeological Park, three kilometers from the city.
The ancient people had built villages of huts of which practically 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 of the park and perhaps the most complex sculpture of the entire archaeological circuit: La Fuente de Lavapatas (foot-washing fountain), where religious ceremonies and ritual baths were held.
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 pools. From the Fuente de Lavapatas, the path climbs through the jungle along the hill ridge to another very important place in the park: Alto del Lavapatas, the highest point of the area.
A green clearing skillfully built by the ancient disappeared civilization from which you can admire the entire landscape in 360 degrees and where one of the most enigmatic statues of the park is found: the Doble Io (the double self), a representation of an Idol on whose head a monkey with a semi-human face is crouched, placed to protect several tombs.
Before concluding the park visit, one cannot miss walking the “Statue Trail,” a solitary path that ventures into the jungle along which thirty-five statues collected from various places have been arranged. Among these, the most famous are the farmer – a depiction of a man holding two agricultural tools – and the warrior.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, tombs and sarcophagi were repeatedly looted, and in addition to gold and ceramics, very important human remains for deeper historical investigation into the origins and end of the mysterious San Agustin civilization were lost. The causes of the disappearance of this “stone people” 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.
