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manage to survive. It is not the tourist season, and this was very lucky for us because we could stop many times to observe parakeets and other small birds enjoying the silence. We walked in the Xilopalos valley where the canyons narrowed, giving us wonderful play of light and colour. We took a dip in an infinity pool overlooking the desert to wash off the dust and sweat. In town an old Transalp with French license plates caught our attention. It belonged to Roberto, a motorcyclist from Turin who raced through the streets of South America, the second of our encounters in this part of the journey. When night fell we understood why this is one of the privileged places for astronomical observation. Without light sources for kilometres, we could observe the Milky Way, and the main constellations like in few other places.
If the road to San Augustin gave us few emotions, it was in the small town that we were overwhelmed by the fantastic history written five thousand years ago by those who lived in this area.
The populations that settled in the Magdalena and Cauca valleys used the course of the rivers to move around and met on the hills where the archaeological park now stands. Commercial and cultural exchanges took place; it was also a location where they buried their dead. The large boulders hurled by now extinct volcanoes were perfect for the sculptors of the time who carved anthropomorphic figures, eagles, jaguars, crocodiles and many other animals. The more than five hundred sculptures tell us about a civilisation born well before the arrival of the Europeans, a civilisation that did not have its own writing and above all for this reason remains mysterious in its organisation and disappearance.
Contemporary history shows us a disorderly city with the highest
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