Nueva Guatavita, Colombia
AA-2026-87023F
On the image
Someone in the 1960s decided that a drowned colonial town could be rebuilt from scratch on a nearby hill, and the result is this: a brand-new old town, laid out with the tidy overconfidence of a planning committee that has never actually lived anywhere. The terracotta roofs, the whitewashed arches, the tall concrete cross standing sentinel over the plaza – all of it built new, all of it designed to look like it had always been there.
Below, the reservoir that made the move necessary sits placid between the mountains, having quietly swallowed the original Guatavita for the sake of a dam and a hydroelectric scheme somebody in Bogotá needed. The circular structure in the foreground, with its tiers of seating and colonnaded ring, looks for all the world like a bullring, because in towns built on Spanish colonial nostalgia, a plaza always ends up looking like a bullring whether or not a bull was ever involved.
A handful of visitors wander the square in the middle distance, dwarfed by architecture that was clearly built for more people than currently use it. It is the particular vanity of relocated towns to be built at the scale of the community that was lost, not the one that actually shows up.
The historian's note
Nueva Guatavita, in the department of Cundinamarca, Colombia, was constructed in the 1960s to rehouse the population of the original town of Guatavita after it was submerged beneath the waters of the Tominé Reservoir. The reservoir was created as part of a hydroelectric and water-supply project intended to serve Bogotá, and the flooding of the old town, along with its colonial-era church and plaza, was a deliberate consequence of the dam's construction.
The replacement town was designed in a Spanish colonial revival style, with whitewashed walls, terracotta tile roofs, and a central plaza intended to echo the character of the original settlement. The circular, tiered structure visible in the town centre functions as a market and gathering space rather than a bullring, though its form deliberately borrows from that traditional building type.
The reservoir and surrounding mountains of the eastern Andean cordillera form the backdrop to the town, which remains inhabited and serves as the municipal seat of Guatavita to this day.
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Nueva Guatavita Overlooking the Tominé Reservoir, Colombia, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-87023F. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/nueva-guatavita-overlooking-the-tomin-reservoir-colombia-1960s.
@misc{aaAA202687023F,
title = {Nueva Guatavita Overlooking the Tominé Reservoir, Colombia, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-87023F},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/nueva-guatavita-overlooking-the-tomin-reservoir-colombia-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Nueva Guatavita Overlooking the Tominé Reservoir, Colombia, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-87023F UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/nueva-guatavita-overlooking-the-tomin-reservoir-colombia-1960s ER -
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