The Gold Museum – Bogotá, Colombia

The Gold Museum is located in the heart of Bogotá, Colombia. While I had already visited this museum a couple of times in the past, I had a chance to go through it again in October 2022, since we visited it with a group of graduate students enrolled in a Global Field Seminar I lectured and which took place in this city.

The museum presents an extraordinary collection of finely crafted pre-Hispanic objects, providing insight into the relationship that indigenous peoples had with precious metals. We learned that the museum welcomes approximately 500,000 visitors a year. It was created in 1939 following the acquisition by the Bank of the Republic of Colombia of an extraordinary piece: the Poporo Quimbaya, an invaluable gold vase dating from the year 300 B.C., which was probably used for the various religious rites of the Quimbaya peoples (lime mixed with coca leaves was ground in it), who lived in the Cauca River valley.

Since then, the collections have grown considerably: the museum has about thirty-four thousand pieces of gold and tumbaga (an alloy of gold and copper), and nearly thirty thousand others in ceramics, precious stones, shells, etc., corresponding to the different indigenous cultures of Colombia: Calima, Muisca, Nariño, Quimbaya, Zenú, Tairona, San Agustín, Tierradentro, Tolima, among others. These rare pieces are a precious testimony to the goldsmithing skills of pre-Hispanic civilizations, which reveal the extent to which indigenous people had an exceptional mastery of metallurgy – 1500 years before the arrival of the conquistadors.

One of my favorite areas is the “Salon Doré” (the Golden Room), where 12,000 gold objects are displayed, glittering even more beautifully thanks to subtle lighting effects, accompanied by traditional music. It may be worth to say that the real treasure of this museum is not the collection of precious objects in itself, but the thought behind that gave them meaning. During the visit, we learned how gold, linked to the Sun (for indigenous peoples, gold is the “Sweat of the Sun”), occupied a special place in pre-Hispanic civilizations: a symbol of power, this precious metal was above all intended for the political and religious elites of the various pre-Hispanic peoples.

The photos presented below highlight some of the objects that captured my attention most.