The most colourful town in Colombia — and a rock you can see for miles
Guatapé is a lakeside town in Antioquia that has turned its facades into an outdoor gallery — every house front is decorated with hand-painted bas-relief 'zócalos' depicting animals, scenes, and patterns in vivid colour, making the streets feel like walking through a folk-art museum. Thirty minutes from the town stands La Piedra del Peñol, a 200-million-year-old granite monolith that rises 220 metres above the surrounding reservoir; 740 painted steps spiral up a crack in the rock to a panoramic view of a thousand islands formed when the valley was flooded for a hydroelectric project in the 19…
Guatapé was founded in 1811 in the fertile Andean valleys of Antioquia, but its modern character was shaped by two forces: the flooding of the Nare River valley in 1978 to create the Peñol-Guatapé Reservoir (displacing the original town of El Peñol, which was drowned), and the subsequent boom in weekend tourism from Medellín, 79km away. The town responded by doubling down on its folk-art zócalo tradition — originally a humble way to distinguish one house from another — transforming it into an identity and an attraction.