The most beautiful Antioquian pueblo — flower-covered balconies, a cable car to the condor viewpoint, hummingbirds, and the Andes at their most dramatic
Jardín is a small town in the southwestern Antioquia department — 135km southwest of Medellín, at 1,750m in the western Andes, and widely considered the most beautifully preserved example of the Antioquian pueblo (the traditional town design of the paisa culture: a central plaza with a large Gothic-revival church, colourful bahareque houses with flowering balconies, a chessboard street grid, and the social life centred on the plaza tienda culture). The town's architectural preservation — the result of geographic isolation (road to Medellín only completed in the 1970s) and community pride — gi…
Jardín was founded in 1863 during the Antioqueño colonisation — the distinctive pattern of migration from established Antioqueño settlements into uncleaned mountain forest, establishing small family farms and the characteristic grid-town pattern. The bahareque construction (a bamboo frame filled with clay, covered with lime plaster) that gives the houses their characteristic look is a technology brought from Antioquia's founding settlements and adapted to the steep Andean slopes. The Gothic-revival parish church (1920s) dominates the plaza as in every Antioqueño pueblo — the building scale (e…