Greater Bogota Convention Bureau

"The Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá is an underground Roman Catholic church built within the tunnels of a salt mine 200 meters underground in a Halite mountain near the town of Zipaquirá, in Cundinamarca, Colombia. It is a very popular tourist destination and place of pilgrimage in the country. From the ceremonial square, the descend to the depth, toward the interior of the Salt Cathedral, stars through the secrete axis ""the oak´s tunnel""; this route prepares the pilgrim in the accesses transition from the external world, to the conceptual internal world as a destination. The entrance is a big crack representing a trip from the material to the immaterial, from the terrestrial to the spiritual.

"As a result of anthropological research, donations and acquisitions, the National Museum of Colombia has built a collection of more than 20,000 objects that are symbols of national history and heritage. The collections include remains of the first inhabitants and material culture of prehispanic societies, objects from current indigenous and afro-colombian ethnography, evidence of different periods of the nation's history, and works of artistically value that range from the colonial period through the works of 'the first modern' artists: Fernando Botero, Alejandro Obregón, Guillermo Wiedemann, Juan Antonio Roda, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, Edgar Negret and Enrique Grau. The Museum offers 17 permanent exhibition galleries with more than 2,500 pieces currently on display, a calendar of temporary exhibitions that allows its visitors to be in touch with important national and international displays of history, art and archaeology, and a varied educational and cultural program that includes seminars, lectures, concerts, video, theatrical and dance performances.

"This large, new, modern building tells the story of how gold and other metals were used by the pre-Hispanic societies that once lived in the territory now known as Colombia. The new scientific and muse graphic text for the exhibition has been built around the metaphor of the metal process, as conceived by pre-Hispanic societies, namely that they extracted metal from the earth, worked it, used it, symbolized it, and finally returned it to the earth in the form of an offering. Museum staff brought this concept together in four main themes, each of which has given its name to the great galleries that make up the permanent exhibition: The Working of Metals, People and Gold in Pre-Hispanic Colombia, Cosmology and Symbolism, and The Offering. The Gold Museum is a place where Colombia's pre-Hispanic past and memory are wonderfully on view. It also fosters present-day cultural diversity. The Exploratorium, which sets out to stimulate curiosity and to encourage the asking of questions, is thus a favorite spot for children, youngsters and even adults to do more than just acquire knowledge, for it encourages them to ask themselves questions about things like who we are, what our archaeological heritage is, and what it means.