0145 COLOMBIA (Cundinamarca) – Environmental Axis and Monserrate Mountain

In 1536 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada has left Santa Marta and the Caribbean coast with 500 soldiers in search of El Dorado. They haven't found the Lost City of Gold, but the survivors, 70 in number, arrived at Bacatá, center of Muisca civilization, where they founded, on August 6, 1538, an urban settlement which they called Santa Fé de Bacatá, as the birthplace of the conquistador and indigenous village name. It had received the modern name of Bogotá after the establishment of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (1717), and became one of the most flourishing city of the Spanish occupation. With independence, Bogotá became the capital of the Gran Colombia (1819), and later the capital of the Republic of Colombia (1886). Now it has nearly 7 million inhabitants and is known as the Athens of South America, because of its numerous universities and libraries.

0072 COLOMBIA (Bolívar) - Márquez’s Cartagena

A postcard from Macondo, the town where it rained for four years, eleven months and two days, would be undoubtedly the most important piece of my collection. But since such a thing will not happen, at least not in this world, I very much want a postcard from Aratacama, the city where saw daylight Gabriel García Márquez and which became later, in his imagination and his writings, Macondo, the mythical space in which is conducted, during a hundred years of solitude,  the Buendias saga.