I’d come to see Salamanca during a fraught
moment of transition for Colombia, a country
that had suffered half a century of violent armed
conflict. I was following the course of the Mag-
dalena River—the central, storied waterway
that runs for nearly a thousand miles through
the heart of the South American nation—and
spending time with people working to support
a fragile peace along its banks. Mid-2018 was a
time of relative calm. It wouldn’t last.
“Better to go before it rains,” Salamanca told
me, gazing at clouds in the crevasses of the valley
as he gripped the cold metal bars of our truck at
every bump in the pavement. The shared cami-
oneta was overflowing with passengers by the
time we whistled it down, and Salamanca and I
were left to hang on to the outside. “Better to go
before it rains,” he repeated quietly to himself.
The most famous artifacts in the massif are the
extraordinary megalithic statues at a UNESCO
World Heritage park of well-manicured lawns
and gravel trails in nearby San Agustín, the
municipal capital. The park boasts large, upright
stone slabs carved into humanlike renderings of
lizards and monkeys that preside over spectacu-
lar views of the surrounding hills.
Strolling the orderly trails of San Agustín is like
visiting a zoo of stones. La Gaitana, in contrast,
Salamanca told me, would be like encountering
pre-Columbian relics in the wild. The site is hid-
den away on a mountainside, the trail obscured by
decades of overgrowth dating to when QuinchanaDEFENDING THE LAND 105