Bogotá 5: Museo del Oro

This album follows on from Bogotá 4: Colonial Bogotá II

The Colombian central bank has a Gold Museum which is very popular. It‘s all gold objects made by Indios in Colombian territory in the 2,000 years or so preceding the arrival of the Spaniards. The museum is HUGE. Hundreds of glass cases displaying what feels like at least 10,000 objects all neatly labelled and explained. Halfway through you catch yourself feeling some sympathy for the Spaniards who of course unceremoniously melted even more of the stuff down. Most of these objects it turns out were really mass-produced, with greater importance attached to their symbolic or ritual value than to artistic quality. (This of course is my view, not the museum‘s!)

That (quite large) object in the upper right corner is in fact a nose ring.
Then when you are quite tired you reach an upper floor with the best stuff. (That nose ring already among it.)
A gold model of a raft used to dump gold offerings (including presumably at some point this model itself) in a sacred lake. Those Indios had a habit of doing this. Handy when you want to establish a gold museum: just drain the lake and…
Not absolutely everything in the museum is made of gold. I like this guy because he so much looks like he was sitting on the loo!

Next album — Tunja