San Agustín Archaeological Park

San Agustín Archaeological Park, about 230 kilometres south of Neiva, is one of the most important pre-Columbian sites in South America and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The park contains the largest collection of pre-Columbian statues on the continent — hundreds of carved stone figures, many guarding burial mounds, spread across a series of forested hillside sites.

The figures are extraordinary in scale and strangeness: powerful, fanged humanoid forms, many with features combining human and animal characteristics. The culture that created them between the 1st and 8th centuries AD left no written records and then vanished entirely. The park itself is beautiful — cloud forest, river gorges, waterfalls — and the setting enhances the mystery of the statues. San Agustín is worth the drive from Neiva and easily justifies spending a night in the town of the same name.

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A story
The statues at San Agustín were carved by a pre-Columbian culture that flourished between the 1st and 8th centuries AD and then disappeared without leaving a written record. Nobody knows exactly who they were, why they created hundreds of monumental figures, or what happened to them. The statues show zoomorphic figures with fanged mouths — half-human, half-jaguar — watching over burial mounds in the cloud forest. When the first Spanish explorers found them in 1756, the people who made them had already been gone for centuries.

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