Zipaquira, Cundinamarca, Colombia - June 7, 2024

[Note: video contains Spanish language]

Zipaquira, a small town northeast of Bogota, has two prodigies to boast to the world. The first is that it is said that, without Zipaquira, Gabriel Garcia Marquez would not have been what he was; the second is that it is home to the so-called "first wonder of Colombia". No one is wrong.

The story of the Zipaquira Salt Cathedral begins in 1930, when the miners built a small chapel in one of the tunnels to pray. "The only thing they had to be safe down here was their virgin," says the guide at the start of the 90-minute tour. The first image of Our Lady of the Rosary of Guasa (not WhatsApp, she jokes) was made out of clay by a young miner. For two decades, the chapel received only workers and their families for Sunday mass, until it was decided to expand the church to accommodate 8,000 worshippers.

But little by little the church began to pose a danger due to leaks ("remember that the main enemy of salt is water", the guide repeats during the tour), so in 1992 a public tender was opened to build a deeper - 60 metres lower than the previous one - and more spectacular one, which is the one we know today and which is a project of the Colombian architect Roswell Garabito Pearl. It is incredible for many reasons and one of them is that everything monumental was made by only 127 miners and everything, everything, everything was sculpted, carved and polished in salt.
What is now considered to be the second largest underground religious temple in the world - the largest being the Damanhur Temple in northern Italy - covers an area of 10 hectares and is divided into three main sections: a tunnel leading through the Stations of the Cross, a dome 11 metres high and eight metres in diameter, and the cathedral proper.
The first part of the route is the 14 Stations of the Cross. Each station is sculpted in an undercut, which you can see later on how it is joined to the rest. Jesus is represented only as a cross of salt which will be increasingly buried as a sign of his suffering. There is no face or any other image. You will only be standing before a cross and an empty space that will only become more and more imposing.

However, not all stations are the same. The fourth, when Jesus meets his mother, is the only one that was carved in a cylindrical shape to reflect the Virgin Mary's embrace of her son. The last station is at the highest part of the sinkhole. From there there is a drop of 18 metres. There is no cross here as Jesus has already died; its shape is carved into the rock. Here everything is salt and symbolism. It was made by five miners with chisel and hammer and fresh water to polish for 12 days.

With images in association with Todo El Panorama.

SHOTLIST:
1. various of the Cathedral.