The River Of Tombs

Nestled in the Colombian massif in Huila province, the Magdalena River is home to Latin America’s largest necropolis and a lost civilisation shrouded in mystery

- SIMON BROUGHTON

We tethered the horses at a fence, walked along a switchback track and then headed down a metal staircase over the rocks to a small plateau called La Chaquira. The voice of a woman singing hovered like birds on thermals. I looked at the ground falling precipitously to the river surging through a winding gorge hundreds of metres below. There were coffee plantations on many of the slopes, but how people managed to harvest them without slipping down into the river I couldn’t imagine.

Examining the view, it felt instinctively like a holy place. Jorge E Peña, my guide, pointed at a rock overlooking the gorge. There was a larger than life-sized figure carved in relief with staring eyes and arms raised. I felt a bit like that myself, gazing at this landscape with its distant waterfalls and rushing river. This was the largest of the incised figures and, with help, I started to make out other images dotted around – of humans and animals. This was a ceremonial site of the people who had lived here well over 1,000 years ago.

Carved in stone

I was on the Colombian massif in the Huila province, an outcrop of mountains where the Andes, the world’s longest mountain chain, unwinds like a rope into three cordilleras that make up the mountain ranges of western Colombia. The river below was the Magdalena, the country’s longest, which is over a kilometre wide when it meets the Caribbean in the Colombian seaport of Barranquilla. But I was standing at its youth where it rushes through El Estrecho, a channel in the rocks 2m wide. “In the local language it’s called Guacacallo, ‘the river of tombs’,” Jorge told me.