Guatape, a small town in Colombia’s Antioquia region, is known for its zocalos, brightly coloured relief panels decorating the lower half of building facades throughout the town, a tradition originally used by families to mark ownership, trade, or social status, functioning almost as a visual language before literacy was widespread in the region. Today these zocalos are maintained and repainted as a point of civic pride and a significant tourist draw, each panel individually designed and often reflecting the specific history or trade of the family who owns the building it decorates.
Much of Guatape’s current form dates only to the 1970s, when a large hydroelectric dam project flooded the original town centre, forcing a substantial relocation and rebuilding of the community on higher ground, a disruption the town has clearly turned into a distinctive, deliberately colourful new identity in the decades since.
A Rock That Dominates the Surrounding Reservoir
El Penon de Guatape, a massive granite monolith rising nearly 200 metres from the artificial lake created by the same dam project that reshaped the town, has become one of Colombia’s most recognisable natural landmarks, a staircase of over 600 steps built directly into a crack in the rock allowing visitors to climb to a viewing platform at its summit. The rock’s formation remains somewhat geologically unusual, an isolated granite outcrop rising sharply from otherwise relatively flat terrain, its exact origins debated among geologists.
The reservoir surrounding Guatape and El Penon, created specifically for hydroelectric power generation, now supplies a significant portion of Colombia’s electricity, a practical infrastructure project that inadvertently created one of the country’s most visited scenic landscapes.
Painting a Town of Colour Beside a Mountain Lake
Guatape’s vividly painted building facades beside its reservoir and rock give a watercolourist bold, joyful colour to work with. We’ve captured that character in our own Guatape Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of Colombia for a wall at home.
Rebuilt after its original town was flooded and painted since in a language older than most of its current buildings, Guatape remains a place whose colour was always more than just decoration.