So Many Teeth in Bogota

Mike Gerrard visits the Gold Museum and other museums in Bogota, Colombia

‘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.

All this and we haven’t even entered the museum yet, and when we do we realise that Bogota’s Gold Museum alone was worth crossing the Atlantic 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 just 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 the Gold Museum I’m reminded of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and the golden mask from Mycenae which prompted the archaeologist Schliemann to say ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon’ – except he hadn’t. This one mask causes people to stop and gasp at its golden beauty. But it is just one mask. In Bogota’s Gold Museum there are three floors of such things – 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.

Back in our room at the Casa Dann Carlton hotel, an information sheets advises us on personal safety and suggests that ‘When leaving the Hotel please try not to expose your jewels’. Thankfully the Museum of Religious Art in Bogota’s charming Old Town district, the Candelaria, has all its jewels exposed. The highlight of the collection is La Lechuga, a monstrance that took seven years to make, from 1700-1707. It is 4902 grams of pure gold, encrusted with 1485 emeralds, 28 diamonds, 13 rubies, 62 pearls, one sapphire, 168 amethysts and one topaz. Just one of the emeralds alone is worth $300,000.

The Museum of Religious Art is one of four intertwining museums, all free, in a block of old mansions just up from the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, the largest library in Latin America, with one million books on the shelves.

The big draw for me is the Botero Museum. Fernando Botero is a Colombian artist whose series of ‘fat people’ shows skill, humour, whimsicality, kindness, cruelty and biting satire all at the same time. He gave his own personal collection of work to the city of Bogota in 2004, and this museum is the result of that bequest. Botero himself oversaw every aspect of its construction, which was one of the conditions of his bequest. Another was that it should be free. He also chose the building, the colour scheme, the lighting and the arrangement of the works.

As well as 123 of his own paintings, including his take on famous works like the Mona Lisa, he donated 85 pieces by other artists showing that Botero must have earned a bit of cash in his time. The warren of rooms on two floors have paintings and sculptures by the likes of Dali, Renoir, Monet, Corot, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Miro, Chagall, Max Ernst, Chirico, Giacometti and Lucian Freud.

At the Gold Museum we’d asked our guide if it was safe to walk around the Candelaria. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘perfectly safe. This is the problem we have in Colombia. Everyone thinks there are kidnappers and drug-dealers on every street corner. Please walk round, and see for yourself. The crime rate is higher in Miami and Washington than it is in Bogota. It’s true! You can check the figures.’ So I did. As far as I could make out, the annual murder rate in Washington DC is 50 per 100,000 population, the worst in the developed world, and in Bogota it’s 40-50 per 100,000, marginally less. So it is safer in Colombia’s capital than it is in the USA’s.

We walked around the Candelaria and enjoyed seeing the Colonial architecture and the two-tone buildings. The top half would be green or yellow, the bottom half blue or ochre, pretty and vivid colours. And we didn’t get killed, kidnapped or offered cocaine. We did see lots of smiling faces, a national characteristic. At Bogota airport, leaving for home, I asked an American tourist what he thought of Colombia. ‘I never saw so many teeth,’ he said.