Jardín, Colombia: the Spirit in the Stone

On February 2, a century ago, the first stone was laid. Few people stop to think about the meaning of a first stone; how much heaven you have to move to put it on. And in this particular case, in how many wills must be agreed to put that stone in a small remote valley of the western mountain range, which is like a balcony from which look a dozen basalt minarets of the Farallones del Citará.

It is not easy to reconstruct the details of the individual and collective acts that moved and nailed that stone. Real stone, not metaphorical, and already mythical stone. We know that the first stone is the end of many jobs: the preparation of a site, the improvement of a business project, the admiration of the design, the plan and the calculations. We owe this last to a Salesian brother.

Giovanni Buscaglione, an Italian architect, perhaps Piedmontese, born in 1874, was commissioned to capture its Gothic aesthetic, its hermetic keys and its Christian tradition in the Garden temple. Buscaglione also left its mark on Villanueva in Medellín, La Candelaria in Bogotá, Barichara and other Colombian, Italian and Turkish localities. It is not the only European presence. The canon of Asian saints rests on a marble altar made in Italy and under a pair of bells of good German iron. How these objects crossed the Atlantic, they ascended the Magdalena, they passed to Cauca and they went up to the sources of the San Juan rivers, it is not known. Fitzcarraldo can give us an idea.

The priest Juan Nepomuceno Barrera made sure that the strokes of Buscaglione became the dream of a community. For twenty years, Father Barrera made the faith rooted in an architectural project and prayers were exchanged for work days. Hundreds of “jardineños” of the first and second generation, our grandparents and great grandparents, climbed the mountain to cut volcanic rock, sat in the park to carve it and organized caravans of muleteers to converge the wood with gold and limestone with the sand. All the inhabitants dedicated the efforts that were left over from simple subsistence to building their common home.

It is said that the temple was finished in 1940. The stone is more dynamic than it is believed; Being eternal, faith is also daily. In the eighties, the earth fractured the walls and the war turned its towers into watchtowers. Throughout time thousands of stones, tiles and mosaics were changed, the towers were alleviated with aluminum. Sacred iconography entered, the most recent of them the Saint Laura Montoya, work of the artist Felipe Giraldo. For the State it became a national heritage and for the Vatican basilica; ours, for the memory of the ancestors.

Photography: Javier Jaramillo