Local museums are one of our favorite ways of learning about an area we’re visiting. Santa Marta’s Tairona Gold Museum does a good job of presenting a lot—both history and pre-history—even though its name seems to reflect only part of that, the history of the indigenous Tairona people and their art.
The building housing the museum is history itself: the oldest building in Colombia’s oldest city. But although the city dates to 1525, the building is much younger, although it’s built on the remains of houses that stood there in the 16th century; the city had a turbulent early history, being several times destroyed by angry local tribes and equally angry English privateers.
The present building dates to 1730, and was built by two brothers as a business building; later they added the second floor so they could live above the store. By 1817, it became headquarters of the Chief Sheriff, and then the home of foreign consulates, and finally the Casea de la Aduana, or Customs House.
Simon Bolivar stayed as a guest in the building for a few days in 1830, while seriously ill. When he died shortly after on a nearby estate, his body lay in state in the house before his funeral in Santa Marta’s Cathedral.
But we really should start with the pre-Hispanic societies of the area; by the time Spanish colonizers arrived, the Tairona were the principal group in the area, and since they were noted for their metalwork, especially in gold, and were known to bury gold ornaments as grave goods, they drew a great deal of unwelcome attention from the Spaniards.
The elaborate work below, with its many gold frogs, was a fertility charm, intended to help couples conceive. It would be worn wrapped around the woman’s arm while the couple had intercourse.
Many died; the remainder moved away, leaving other peoples in the area whose art is expressed in stone and clay rather than metal.
The pieces below come from a number of different peoples who lived in the area over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
The natural environment of the area gets a look, too, both in exhibits and views from the balconies.
The museum’s other strength is its exhibits on the history and development of Santa Marta after 1525. That includes both artifacts and explanations from the earliest settlement, through discussions of the classes and divisions among the new arrivals and their descendants.
That includes the history of the second colonization, by United Fruit Company, the U.S. based company that built a near monopoly of the banana trade in Central and South America. It’s the company whose high-handed tactics over local governments gave rise to the expression “banana republic.” Santa Marta was one of its most important sites up to 1980. United Fruit had its own railroad, its own fleet of ships, its own rules, and very nearly its own army. The display at right recounts its massacre of striking workers in 1925.
Folklore gets a turn, too. In nearby Cienega, an annual cayman festival celebrates the macabre story of a fisherman with two daughters. According to the story, one day the older daughter didn’t come home, and the fisherman asked the other what had happened. She began to dance and sing, chanting that her sister had been eaten by a cayman.
In the annual celebration, dancers wear cayman costumes such as this one, and dance and sing the song about the beautiful daughter eaten by the reptile, all refusing to let the old fisherman know the truth: The daughter ran off with her unsuitable boyfriend, and told her sister to tell their father the story.
