Photo Galleries
Jardin and Manizales
December 2018
Our last stops in Colombia were the small town of Jardin (pronounced “hardeen”) and the mid-size city of Manizales, both in the mountains of Colombia’s central coffee-growing region. Jardin was a vibrant place during Christmas week. Each day, its cafes and plazas filled up with more residents’ relatives visiting for the holiday (some from as far as the United States and Canada), including the lovely family we rented a room from. Besides meeting lots of friendly people, highlights in Jardin included horseback riding, birdwatching, and paragliding high above the town. We had a much quieter New Year’s week in Manizales, focusing on work, with occasional outings to see some of the city’s mountain views and surprising modern sculptures.
Looking down on the lovely town of Jardin
Jardin's main plaza is the town's living room, surrounded by cafes that spill out into the square
An especially colorful home in Jardin
These coloful open-sided buses, called chivas (goats), connect Jardin with neighboring towns
The view from our window: In Jardin, horses are almost as common as cars
Jardin's pride and joy is its church, a minor basilica built of stone, much grander than the wooden churches in other small country towns
The story goes that when the church was being built in the 1920s, people seeking forgiveness of their sins were required to carry stones from the local quarry as penance, which sped up construction
The church (decorated for Christmas) features an altar carved from Italian marble
A lovely marble statue in the church
A ravine on the edge of Jardin is home to a colony of Andean cock of the rock birds
Beautiful countryside around Jardin
We went horseback riding in the. hills around the town
Riding with us was a nice Colombian family from Medellin; Jardin is a favorite country getaway for people from that city
During our ride, we stopped to explore a tunnel dug by hand by an eccentric resident of Jardin
The tunnel is home to lots of bats, who sleep huddled in big family groups
We stopped at a small country store for a rest and a cold drink . . .
. . . where we were serenaded by the proprietor
An old-fashioned cable car runs from a hillside down into Jardin. It was built to carry bags of coffee beans from farms into the town
As a Christmas present, Melissa went paragliding in the mountains above Jardin
Taking off with her pilot
Airborne Melissa!
Jardin (which means garden) lives up to its name with many pretty flowers
We loved this yellow tree in the main plaza
When we left Jardin, our chiva had an unexpected half-hour stop because of a road construction project
The city of Manizales, where we spent a week around New Year's
A spire of the Manizales cathedral and an odd modern sculpture of independence leader Simon Bolivar as a condor
The cathedral is dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary
Sunday crowds in a downtown park in Manizales
A dramatic modern sculpture depicting the colonizers from Medellin who treked over high mountains to settle Manizales in the 19th century
Manizales is built over many hills
Park and observation tower in the Chipre neighborhood, atop one of Manizales's many hills
Manizales now has a modern cable car system connecting different parts of the city, but earlier it had this aerial network to transport coffee harvests
This wooden tower is all that remains of the early 20th-century cableway that carried coffee more than 40 miles from the mountains to river ports
