Gold Museum/ Museo de Oro
A trip to the world's best gold museum found in Bogota, Colombia
Suite writer Mike Gerrard contributes his tale of visiting Bogota's Gold Museum/Mueo de Oro in Columbia.
'Coca is very good for the health,' our guide told us, and he wasn't talking about cola. We were in Colombia, after all, but even here you don't export the country's most famous export to be praised quite so openly by a tour guide. 'It has many different minerals in it, gives you strength and helps cope with the altitude up in the mountains. The indigenous people have always used coca. But of course I am talking about the natural plant. The difference between coca and cocaine is like the difference between grapes and wine.'
So he wasn't tooting the horn for substance abuse after all, but as part of our tour of Bogota's biggest visitor attraction, the Gold Museum, we were learning why the country produces such a bumper coca crop. It produces bumper crops of everything. It's the second biggest flower exporter in the world, after the Netherlands, produces vast amounts of coal and gold, and has more bird species than Brazil, which is seven times bigger. There's now one more, thanks to the discovery in October of the Yariguies brush-finch. This follows on from the unearthing in June of a new butterfly species, the Heliconius heurippa.
All this and we haven't even entered the museum yet. When we do we realise that Bogota's Gold Museum alone was worth coming to Colombia to see. It has 36,000 gold pieces on display. So plentiful was gold among the native Indians that they even used it to make fish-hooks with. To them it wasn't a precious metal, it was simply a suitable material to work with. They didn't realise how precious it was till the Spaniards came and would kill to get their hands on it. Likewise, cocaine was first produced in Germany, not in Colombia. Colombia is a victim of its own fertility.
In Bogota's Gold Museum there are three floors of magnificent masks, coins, necklaces, headdresses, statues. In one cabinet dozens and dozens of golden crescents seem to fly in formation across the wall of the room. Looking closer I see that they're nose-rings. At the end of the visit you walk into a room which slowly darkens, and then lights reveal yet more treasures in the floor beneath your feet. It's a breathtaking end to a breathtaking museum: the Gold Museum in Bogota.
For more of Mike Gerrard's writing, please visit his page at Suite101: http://ukirelandtravel.suite101.com/
