In January, during my stay in Bogota, I traveled to Zipaquira with my family and a group of friends from the Netherlands who were visiting us. They were interested in seeing a Salt Cathedral that has been built underground the Andes mountains, and that according to several tourist books, is considered one of the Colombian wonders. Although I had stopped several times in the town of Zipaquira before when I traveled across the Altiplano Cundiboyacense (a huge highland plateau in the center of Colombia), I never visited the famous cathedral. I was pretty curious about how an underground church made out of salt inside of a mountain would look.
We rented a van for 11 people so we could go together in just one vehicle. After picking up all the members of the group in Bogota, we took the Autopista Norte, a kind of highway that, as its name denotes, communicates the Capital of Colombia with the north of the country. The Autopista is pretty fast compared to other roads and after one hour of driving and enjoying the mountainous landscape of the Altiplano, we arrived to Zipaquira.
The town of Zipaquira, located at 2,652 meters above sea level, has a long history of salt extraction that goes back to pre-Columbian times. Before the Spaniards arrived to this area and created a colonial mining infrastructure, the indigenous group of the Muiscas extracted and commercialized salt from this place. The name of one of their kings was actually Zipa and he ruled all the south part of the Altiplano where the Muiscas were settled. The salt deposits of Zipaquira are so rich, that even after hundreds of years of exploitation, people continue extracting the mineral.
The entrance to the Cathedral is in the top of a public park, near a square called Plaza del Minero (Miner Square). In order to enter each person has to pay a $10.000 pesos fee ($5 dollars aprox). Although the park authorities advertise a bilingual tour inside the Cathedral the most probable situation is that the guide only speaks Spanish. That was our case and I ended translating to our Netherlander friends some of the information that the guide delivered. Once we crossed a long mining tunnel of that had many light bulbs on its arches, light faded down and the smell of minerals became stronger. We arrived to the entrance of the church, the Narthex, and for me, everything looked very dark. The floor, the walls, and the roof had a black and gray color that became blue-ish due to the effect of LED lights that were decorating the walls.
As we continued descending through a dark corridor, we encountered several small chapels that represented the events of Jesus’ last journey. Their representation, of course, was very abstract. Chairs, banks, crosses, characters, altars and locations of each station of the Cross (Via Cruxis), were made with the raw elements of the mine: salt rock. Miners sculpted each of the pieces and used explosives to create the different elements of the chapels. This is a picture of one of the stations of the cross:
After passing all of the stations of the cross, our descend continued through a huge dark corridor that worked as an aisle. The LED lighting designed for the cathedral is very soft so the dark color of the salt rock is predominant. Just few elements are illuminated in a brighter mode highlighting their importance. For instance, there is an illuminated Guardian Andel carved in marble (one of the few things that are not made with rock salt) by the Italian sculptor Ludovico Consorte in 1950.
Approximately 200 meters underground, we reached the main nave of the Cathedral where an enormous cross stands out. The nave is pretty impressive not only by its size but also by the dramatic lighting that illuminates the walls.
As I started to feel without enough oxygen to breath at this point, I realized that even if the cathedral was an impressive human work, it was also not a very comfortable place to stay. Perhaps it was due to my lack of experience being inside an underground cave or inside a mine. In any case, I decided that I was going to come back to the exterior of the cathedral. On my way back to the exit, at a very slow ascending pace, I encountered another detail of the architecture that made think about the kind of atmosphere that was present in the whole underground infrastructure: a massive cylindrical column sculpted on a rock. I thought that there was a brutalist style of architecture in this cathedral that can transmit a sensation of overwhelm and heaviness. This sensation, was complemented by the lack of oxygen, the darkness, and the closure of an underground environment. The brutalist style of the cathedral had also a bit of sci-fi aesthetic quality. Specially when one think about how it would feel to live in a different planet, a halite world.
When I finally reached the ground I was glad to breath fresh air and receive the sun light. I thought visiting the cathedral was a unique experience. I was impressed by the monumental size of all the elements of the church and as well by the architecture. However, I also realized that a salt mine can make me weak due to the lack of oxygen and the magnetic fields that the halite rock can create.
