Jardín

The earliest traces of people in the valley are graves probably left by the Chamí, speakers of the Catío language, who were also known as Docatoes after the Docató, today's San Juan River. Spanish settlement came late. Jardín grew out of the Antioquian colonisation of the 19th century, which was at its peak in the 1860s: in 1863 the settler Indalecio Peláez claimed large tracts of land between two streams, the Volcanes and El Salado. Legend says the founders, looking down on the forested valley from the Alto de las Flores, were so taken with its beauty that they called it a garden — jardín.

In 1864 the priest José María Gómez Ángel and two other priests arrived, having fled General Mosquera, then in Medellín, and encouraged the settlers to create a more independent village. Jardín became a parish in 1871 and was declared a town in 1882. Coffee, plantain, beans and sugarcane became its living, and the great stone basilica rose over the square, built of stone cut by hand from the Tapartó river.

Unlike many Antioquian towns, Jardín has remained largely unchanged for about 140 years. Its main square was declared a national monument in 1985, and in 2012 the national government named it a heritage town of Colombia, the second municipality in Antioquia to receive the distinction. Tourism has since become a basic source of income.

Jardín's architecture is its pride: whitewashed houses with brightly painted doors, windows and balconies, many hung with flowers, and cowhide chairs, some hand-painted with local scenes. The main square, with its gardens and coloured wooden chairs, is the centre of town life, where farmers and visitors share the tables of the cafés around the basilica.

The town is part of the paisa world of south-western Antioquia — Catholic, hard-working and proud of its settler origins — and its basilica, a Neo-Gothic church that became a minor basilica in 2003, is the focus of religious life. The writer Manuel Mejía Vallejo is honoured in the House of Culture, which holds his ashes, and the Clara Rojas Museum preserves the furniture of the colonisation era. Crafts were traditionally made by nuns.

The countryside matters as much as the town. Jardín's rivers, the San Juan, Claro and Dojurgo, run through cloud forest that is home to more than 300 bird species, and visitors come to watch the Andean cock-of-the-rock at a reserve near the town and to look for the yellow-eared parrot. About a tenth of the population is Indigenous, and the municipality has its own municipal anthem, the 'Hymn to Jardín'.

The 2018 census counted about 13,500 people in the municipality, which lies between the San Juan River and a branch of the Western Cordillera, bordering Andes, Jericó and Támesis to the north and the department of Caldas to the south.

For generations most people grew coffee, plantains, beans and sugarcane, and agriculture remains important; trout farming is another local business. Today tourism is a basic source of income: the town has more than 40 hotels, far more than most Antioquian municipalities, along with restaurants, guides, moto-ratón drivers and craft makers. The two cable car lines, completed in 2007, were built partly so that farmers from the villages of La Selva, La Linda and La Salada could bring their goods to town and return home.

The rhythm of the day centres on the square. Farmers come into town to sell and to meet, cafés fill through the afternoon and evening, and on weekends and holidays visitors from Medellín crowd the plaza. Rain is frequent throughout the year, and life adjusts around afternoon showers.

Trout is Jardín's dish. Caught in the local rivers or raised in farms around the town, it is served whole with patacones (fried green plantain), rice and salad, and trout farms around the town double as places to eat it. The menú del día, a set lunch of soup and a main course, is the everyday meal.

The rest of the cooking is Antioquian: frijoles, red beans cooked with pork, with rice and a plain white arepa; bandeja paisa for big appetites; and sancocho, a stew of meat with potato, cassava and plantain. Sweets are a local pride, and a confectionery shop founded in the town in 1995 has become one of its best-known businesses.

Coffee grown on the surrounding slopes is drunk in the cafés of the square, both as tinto, small cups of sweet black coffee, and as better local brews, alongside fresh fruit juices. In the evening the same tables turn to beer and aguardiente, the anise spirit of Antioquia.