Cradle of Liberty: Rionegro for Families

About this tour

Rionegro is where Colombia decided what kind of country it wanted to be. In February 1812 the Constitution of the Free State of Antioquia was signed in the cathedral sacristy. On 7 February 1813 the town became the first in Antioquia to declare full independence. And on 4 February 1863 sixty-four delegates signed the Constitution of Rionegro, the most radically liberal document in nineteenth-century Latin America: it abolished the death penalty, split church from state and split the country into nine sovereign states. Camilo walks you from the bronze of Jose Maria Cordova across the plaza to a crown set with 305 diamonds, into the house where the constitution was signed, then out to the mountains where La Patasola and La Madremonte still live, to the empanada capital of the world and a park built for small legs. Fifteen stops, free museums and lunch worth planning around.

Stops on this tour

1. 1

   Plaza de la Libertad — The Cradle of Liberty

   Stand on the grass in the middle and turn a full circle. Roughly eight hundred square metres of lawn, ringed by streets that are pedestrian-only now, so a small child can run here without you holding your breath. Three separate acts of defiance happened within sight of this spot, which is why Colombians call Rionegro La Cuna de la Libertad, the Cradle of Liberty. In February 1812 the Constitution of the Free State of Antioquia was signed in the cathedral sacristy on the eastern edge of the square. On 7 February 1813 Rionegro became the first city in Antioquia to declare complete independence from Spain. On 4 February 1863, two blocks from here, sixty-four delegates signed the constitution that created the Estados Unidos de Colombia. Look east for the neoclassical facade and bell tower of the Concatedral de San Nicolas el Magno. Look to the centre for the bronze horseman: Jose Maria Cordova, eight and a half tons of him. And look down, because there is more underneath you. The Museo de Artes de Rionegro occupies the basement of the plaza, whose renovation won the BAQ 2020 Pan-American Award for public space. Rionegro sits at 2,100 metres and averages 18 degrees all year, so bring a layer even in sunshine.

2. 2

   Cordova Monument — The Man on the Horse

   Get close enough to read the pedestal. The man on the horse was born on 8 September 1799 in the parish of La Concepcion, then part of Rionegro, to a father who was the local mayor. He joined the independence movement at fifteen. His mentor was Francisco Jose de Caldas, the Sabio, astronomer and cartographer, who was executed by the Spanish in 1816; a second mentor, the French colonel Emanuel Roergas Serviez, was assassinated the same year. Cordova was seventeen and had already buried the two men who shaped him. At the Battle of Boyaca in 1819 Bolivar promoted him to General on the spot: he was nineteen. He reached Rionegro on 25 August 1819, liberated Medellin five days later, and was Governor of Antioquia before his twentieth birthday. In December 1824, at Ayacucho, he commanded the First Division, three thousand men, against Spanish artillery holding the high ground, and gave the order still quoted today: Division, de frente, armas a discrecion, paso de vencedores. After the battle General Sucre took off his own epaulettes and pinned them on Cordova's shoulders. He was twenty-five. He rebelled against Bolivar's turn to dictatorship and was killed at El Santuario on 17 October 1829, aged twenty-nine. The airport you flew into carries his name, and so does a Colombian department.

3. 3

   Cordova Monument — Arenas Betancourt's Bronze

   Walk around to the other side of the pedestal and look at the sculpture as a piece of art rather than a piece of history. The horse is caught mid-charge and Cordova's arm is raised, not in a generic heroic pose but at the specific instant of the order at Ayacucho: paso de vencedores, the step of winners. Six metres tall, eight and a half tons of bronze, hauled here and set on that block. The sculptor was Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, born 23 October 1919 in Fredonia, a coffee town roughly two hours south. Before he was Colombia's most important sculptor he was a farmer, a postal worker and a photographer, and he carved wooden Christs for rural churches. He trained at the Instituto de Bellas Artes in Medellin and the Universidad Nacional in Bogota, then in Mexico at the Academia de San Carlos and La Esmeralda, where he absorbed the muralist habit of telling national history at epic scale. His thirty-eight-metre tower in La Alpujarra in Medellin, the Monumento a la Raza, is his; so are the Lanceros del Pantano de Vargas near Paipa, thirty-three metres and the largest sculpture in Colombia. He died in 1995 in Caldas, near Medellin, where his workshop had trained a generation of sculptors.

4. 4

   Concatedral de San Nicolas — The Goovaerts Facade

   The facade in front of you was drawn in 1926 by the Belgian architect Agustin Goovaerts, but the church behind it is far older: inaugurated on 8 September 1804, on the site of a thatched-roof chapel from the 1660s. Entry is free and the doors are open from 6:30 in the morning until 7:30 at night, until 8 on Sundays, with a wheelchair-accessible entrance. Step in and let your eyes adjust; the coloured light usually buys you a few minutes with a restless child. The sculptures and paintings around the nave come largely from the Quiteno School, the colonial workshops of what is now Ecuador. The cathedral's real treasure sits next door in the Museo de Arte Religioso, in the old sacristy where the 1812 constitution was signed. After Ayacucho in December 1824, artisans descended from the Inca made a crown of golden laurel and palm set with three hundred and five diamonds. Bolivar received it, declared himself unworthy of it, and handed it to the hero of the battle, Jose Maria Cordova, who was born in this town and who spelled his surname with a V instead of a B as a deliberate snub to Spanish convention. He brought it home in January 1826, and it is still here.

5. 5

   Concatedral de San Nicolas — The Quiteno School

   Get close to one of the carved figures and look at three things: the face, the hands, and the folds of the fabric. The Quiteno School began in 1535, forty-three years after Columbus, when a Flemish Franciscan friar named Jodoco Ricke opened the first art school in the Americas in Quito and began training indigenous and mestizo artists in Baroque painting and Renaissance sculpture. They did not copy. The faces you are looking at are neither strictly European nor strictly indigenous; the Christs and Virgins carry the features of the people who carved them. Two techniques give the work its unmistakable surface. Estofado: gold leaf laid on the wood, painted over, then scratched back in fine lines so the gold burns through the colour. Encarnado: flesh tones built up in translucent layers until the skin appears lit from inside. Look for glass eyes, real human hair used for eyelashes, and shoulders and elbows jointed so a figure could be posed and carried in procession. Carlos III of Spain is said to have remarked that he was not troubled that Italy had Michelangelo, because in his American colonies he had the master Caspicara. That was Manuel Chili, an indigenous sculptor from Quito.

6. 6

   Museo de Arte Religioso — The Virgin of Arma

   This room is the old sacristy, which means the Constitution of the Free State of Antioquia was signed on this floor in 1812. It now holds the crown and the Virgin, and it keeps its own hours: it opens at 2 in the afternoon on Sundays and at 3 on weekdays for the crown viewing, so check before you queue. The small wooden Virgin standing here began life in the private chapel of King Felipe II in Madrid in the sixteenth century. He gave her away, to a struggling colonial outpost high in the Andes called Santiago de Arma, where the water was scarce and the mines ran out. In 1783 the colonial authorities transferred that dying city's title, privileges and coat of arms to thriving Rionegro down in the valley, and the Virgin was carried down the mountain paths on the shoulders of the faithful. She was crowned in 1959 in a ceremony that filled the plaza outside, and Rionegro calls her Emperatriz Soberana, Permanent President of the City Council, and Mayor of the City. Look at the blue mantle: thirty-four kilograms of it, embroidered by ten Spanish nuns over eight years with twenty-four carat gold thread from Lyon and one thousand four hundred and three pearls. Every 8 September she leaves the cathedral and processes through these streets.

7. 7

   Casa de la Maestranza — Antioquia's Arsenal

   Ignore the shopfronts at street level and look up. Balconies, a worn colonial facade, no plaque-covered museum entrance, no ticket desk. This is the Casa de la Maestranza, and in 1813 it was the Palace of the Supreme Government of the Free State of Antioquia under Juan del Corral, the President Dictator. A maestranza is an arsenal. In 1814 del Corral needed weapons, engineers and trained officers, and he called in Francisco Jose de Caldas, the Sabio, the same man who had mentored the teenage Cordova. Caldas turned this building into a military engineering school. Behind these walls they forged cannon, cast bronze for artillery, manufactured gunpowder and built machinery for the Casa de la Moneda in Medellin, and they trained a generation of young Antioquians who became the officers of the independence armies. In December 1815, with the Spanish Reconquest approaching, the maestranza shut its doors and the leaders scattered. Caldas was captured and executed the following year, aged forty. Look at street level for the commemorative plaques to Caldas and to del Corral; they are the only marker that one of the places where independence was literally forged is now a row of small businesses.

8. 8

   Casa de la Convencion — The Constitution of 1863

   Walk through the front door. Sixty-four delegates did exactly that on 4 February 1863: lawyers, generals, landowners and idealists from across the country, who then sat in these rooms for weeks arguing over what Colombia should be. What they produced abolished the death penalty, in 1863, one hundred and eighteen years before France did. It guaranteed freedom of the press and freedom of religion, and it separated church from state in a profoundly Catholic country. Victor Hugo is said to have called it a constitution written for a nation of angels. The museum is free, open Monday to Saturday from 10 in the morning to 7 at night, with six thematic rooms. Find the original cedar table the delegates signed at, and the chest with three separate locks that protected the constitutional documents, its three keys held by three different men. The third room belongs to Cordova, with paintings and military artefacts. The fourth holds a nineteenth-century luxury carriage and Antioquia's first printing press, the machine that carried revolutionary argument across the region. When small legs give out, the central patio has a stone fountain, whitewashed walls and baked-clay floors that have not changed since 1863.

9. 9

   Casa de la Convencion — The Radical Olympus

   Stand at the signing table and consider what it produced. The Constitution of Rionegro came out of a civil war: in 1860 Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera, governor of Cauca, rebelled against the central government, took Bogota by July 1861, made himself president and called a convention to rewrite the country. Rionegro was chosen because it was far from Bogota, because Antioquia was powerful and relatively neutral, and because this town had a reputation for progressive thinking. What the delegates wrote created nine sovereign states, each with its own president, its own congress and its own army; states could in principle make war on one another. The federal president served two years with no immediate re-election, chosen indirectly by the states rather than by voters. Press freedom was absolute, libel included. Anyone could buy, sell or carry weapons without restriction. The era that followed was called the Olimpo Radical, the Radical Olympus, and it produced sweeping reform alongside roughly forty regional civil wars. In 1885 Rafael Nunez declared that the Constitution of Rionegro had ceased to exist, and the centralist charter that replaced it in 1886 governed Colombia until 1991.

10. 10

    Casa de la Convencion — Rendon the Caricaturist

    In 1994, for the centenary of his birth, this house hung Ricardo Rendon's caricatures blown up to mural size in the building where the constitution was signed. He was born on 11 June 1894 on the Calle Real, a short walk from the plaza, the son of a calligraphy teacher, and by seventeen he was in Medellin studying at the Instituto de Bellas Artes under Francisco Antonio Cano. He did not become a painter. He became the most influential political artist Colombia has produced, working for El Espectador, La Republica and El Tiempo for thirteen years, reducing a face, a scandal or a policy to a handful of lines. When Rendon drew a politician as corrupt, the country believed it. At his peak he earned more than the president of the republic. His longest-lived drawing is the one you still see on packets across Colombia: the logo for Cigarrillos Pelirroja. On 28 October 1931 he walked into a Bogota cafe called La Gran Via, sat down and shot himself, at thirty-seven, leaving a napkin that read please do not take me home. A mural by the Colectivo Buenasiembra downtown honours him under the title Rionegro Tierra de Artistas.

11. 11

    Road to San Antonio — Patasola and Madremonte

    Look out at the ridges and the forest climbing them, because that is the setting for everything in this chapter. La Patasola appears as a beautiful woman who calls to men travelling alone through the jungle: miners, farmers, wanderers. By the time they are close enough to see the single leg ending in a bovine hoof, it is too late. Some versions say she was cursed for infidelity, others that she guards the forest from those who would damage it; either way campesinos here have been warning their sons about her for generations. La Madremonte, the Mother of the Mountain, is covered in moss and leaves with eyes like green fire, and she commands the fog, the rain and the rivers. Cut trees without purpose or foul a stream and you will get lost in fog that comes from nowhere and meet floods on a clear day. It is environmental law written centuries before anyone wrote environmental law. El Mohan is the third, wild-haired and glowing-eyed, living in river caves near Dabeiba, said to have been an ancient shaman who saw the Spanish conquest coming and fled into the wilderness with indigenous treasure. He steals fish from nets. All three walk through Rionegro's streets every December on the floats of the Desfile de Mitos y Leyendas.

12. 12

    Road to San Antonio — Desfile de Mitos y Leyendas

    The parade this chapter describes runs every December, at night, as part of Rionegro's Christmas season, and it is now in its thirty-fifth year. Fourteen floats move through streets lined with thousands of people, each carrying one myth built at enormous scale, articulated so arms wave and heads turn, and lit from inside so the figures glow against the dark. La Llorona, the weeping woman searching for her drowned children. El Cura sin Cabeza, the headless priest still haunting colonial streets in search of redemption. El Hojarasquin, a walking man made of rustling leaves who protects fallen timber. El Sombreron, a tiny man in an enormous hat who braids the manes of horses at midnight. Neighbourhood groups, families and schools spend months building them and compete for prizes, though nobody here thinks the prizes are the point. In 2019 a fire in the storage warehouse destroyed all nineteen figures, more than two hundred million pesos of work and generations of tradition. The community raised the money immediately and started again before the ashes cooled, and the parade went out that same December with new figures. Tradition here is not a thing behind glass; it is a thing you rebuild when it burns.

13. 13

    San Antonio de Pereira — The Empanada Capital

    You are in the self-declared Capital Mundial de la Empanada, the empanada capital of the world, seven minutes from a plaza where a constitution was signed. The village keeps its colonial shape: low facades, flower-filled balconies, and a church whose wooden interior is unlike anything else in eastern Antioquia, warm and close-grained where the cathedral you just left is cool stone. Go in if the doors are open. Around the square there is playground equipment, which after two museums and a car ride is the single most useful fact in this description. Let them run. EmpanaRicas is on the plaza, open weekends from 9 in the morning to 8 at night, and does variations you will not find elsewhere: maduro with chicharron, mushroom and chicken. The traditional Antioquian version is seasoned meat and potato wrapped in corn masa and deep-fried, and you judge it on the first bite: the shell should shatter rather than bend. The dessert shops around the plaza sell natilla, buñuelos and brevas con arequipe, figs with dulce de leche. If you want a full sit-down meal instead, El Rancherito on the Via Sajonia is about fifteen minutes back toward the highway, and the portions are, in the local word, descomunales.

14. 14

    San Antonio de Pereira — Paisa Food as Engineering

    Look at what is on the plate in front of you and read it as engineering. Paisa cooking is mountain food, built to fuel the arrieros who drove mule trains over Andean passes: long days of physical labour, high altitude, cold nights, so every dish is dense with calories that stay with you. The empanada is not delicate on purpose. The masa is dried corn, ground and shaped; the filling is meat and potato and often hogao, the cooked tomato and onion base that turns up in nearly everything here. Deep-frying was preservation as much as flavour, because before refrigeration fat-sealed food survived days on the trail. The buñuelo is the purest example: cheese, cornmeal, egg and a little sugar, fried until it puffs, protein and carbohydrate in something you can carry in a pocket. And the bandeja paisa is named for the tray it takes to hold it, because no single traditional meal ever contained beans, rice, ground beef, chicharron, chorizo, fried egg, arepa, plantain, avocado and tomato at once. It was invented by restaurants as a sampler of everything Antioquian cooking does. Ask for a media if you want to finish it. There is a saying here: paisa come para trabajar, a paisa eats in order to work.

15. 15

    Parque Comfama Tutucan — The Lake and the Boats

    Twenty-four hectares, the largest of Comfama's parks by area, and the deliberate opposite of everything else on this tour. The lake is the first thing to head for, because you can buy food there for the ducks and the fish, and no three-year-old has ever turned that down. There are pedal boats and rowboats on it, a small train that circles the pond, heated swimming pools, which matters at 2,100 metres, trampolines sized for small children, and a drop tower called the Mega Drop that is emphatically for later years. The part worth walking to is Tutucan, a recreated traditional Antioquian village inside the park, with costumed characters, artisans demonstrating old crafts and weekend shows: living history at toddler pace. Opening hours are Wednesday to Sunday from 9 to 5, and Tuesday from 10 to 5. Foreign visitors pay roughly 48,000 pesos for adults and 24,000 for children, and the park's number is 604 360 70 80. Two practical things: bring towels, and swim caps are compulsory in the pools, though they sell them on site if you forget. The park sits about ten minutes from San Antonio de Pereira, so you can also do it first and come back for the empanadas.