Piedras Blancas and Arví: The Archaeology Above Medellín

Most visitors ride the Metrocable to Parque Arví for the forest. The park sits inside something larger: a national protected archaeological area of 3,200.9 hectares, with a further 3,693.7 hectares of buffer zone, declared in 2019 across the municipalities of Medellín and Guarne (ICANH Resolución 24 de 2019). Inside it are stone roads, 1,300 walled fields, salt springs worked before the Spanish arrived, and colonial gold mines.

The archaeologists who wrote the site’s management plan describe “an intense process of occupation over at least 5,000 years” (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 4). What they have not settled is who built the roads people come to walk. This guide reports what the Spanish-language sources say, including where they contradict each other.

The numbers, at a glance

Where is Piedras Blancas?

The upper Piedras Blancas basin lies about 20 km east of Medellín, between 2,340 and 2,680 metres above sea level (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 10). It is in Santa Elena, one of the five corregimientos that make up rural Medellín. A corregimiento is a rural district of the municipality, divided in turn into veredas, or rural settlements. Santa Elena became a corregimiento in 1987 under Acuerdo 54 and covers 7,412.83 hectares (Alcaldía de Medellín). Its vereda Piedras Blancas is “the most extensive of the corregimiento and of Medellín”, at 2,223.67 hectares, or 30% of Santa Elena (Alcaldía de Medellín, Raíces) — the same municipal dataset as the figure above, on a second city page, so count them as one source.

Santa Elena is also home to the silleteros, the flower farmers of the Feria de las Flores (see our sourced history of the silleteros).

The management plan calls the zone geostrategically important and documents institutional action there in 1874, 1918, 1947–1952 and 1970 (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 7). The Piedras Blancas dam, built between 1948 and 1952 and the first earth dam in Antioquia, lies in the jurisdiction of Guarne (Alcaldía de Medellín).

The surrounding Río Nare protective forest zone was first reserved in 1970. In 2010 it was redrawn to 8,829 hectares, down from the 118.25 km² (11,825 ha) reserved in 1970, and one of its stated objectives is “to contribute to conserving the Nation’s archaeological heritage zone” (Resolución 1510 de 2010).

What did the archaeologists find?

Almost everything known about the site comes from a single document — the 2018 management plan — and much of that from fieldwork by its own authors. What the plan reports is a worked landscape rather than a ruined city: “roads, irrigation ditches, canalised creeks, various kinds of stone structures … crop fields, platforms, middens, abundant pottery and salados” (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 5).

Most of the mapping comes from a 2014 survey that walked about 2,724 hectares over 70 days and recorded 2,433 GPS points. It was a diagnostic phase: the plan states that “no test pits, clearing or collection of materials were carried out” (same, PDF p. 5). Excavation results quoted below come from separate projects.

The walled fields, or campos circundados

The most numerous features are campos circundados, “spaces clearly bounded by walls of earth and stone”. Local people still farm them and call them huertas, gardens. Researchers have mapped 1,300. Their density, and absolute dates from eight of the fields, led the authors “to propose the hypothesis that the start of their construction could date back 2,900 years before the present” (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 17). The plan calls it a hypothesis, and so should anyone quoting it: eight dated fields out of 1,300 is a sample of well under one per cent. All the dates in the plan are given as uncalibrated radiocarbon years, without the sample material or the stratigraphic context that would let a specialist judge what each one dates.

Salt: salados and ojos de aguasal

A salado is a saltwater spring; locally they are also called ojos de aguasal, “brine eyes” (Alcaldía de Medellín). The plan describes them as “a resource evidently exploited in pre-Hispanic times and comparatively exceptional in the Aburrá valley”. It records five with evidence of pre-Hispanic management on the north-western slope between the Piedras Blancas and Gurupera creeks, and maps seven salados in total (ICANH management plan, PDF pp. 5, 17, 22).

A 2017 study found that a settlement near the springs, occupied for about 180 years from the early 16th century, “is distinguished by goldsmithing and salt production”. Its author suspects that shallow, wide-mouthed, bevel-rimmed bowls at the late sites near the springs were used to evaporate brine (Obregón-Cardona 2017, Boletín de Antropología). The same study describes Piedras Blancas in the Late pre-Hispanic period as “a dispersed settlement in which there are no villages” — people lived spread across the hillsides, not in towns.

El Tiestero and the pottery

In the centre of vereda Mazo, pottery lies visible on the surface in a single layer “traced across more than 100 hectares”. Within that scatter is a dense dump of about 3,000 m² that archaeologists call a midden and residents call “El Tiestero”, from tiesto, a potsherd (ICANH management plan, PDF pp. 17, 76).

The plan gives two dates for the deposit: 1430 ± 60 BP (lab code Beta 67470) for its start and 1540 ± 60 BP (Beta 67471) for its possible abandonment. As printed those are the wrong way round — 1540 BP is the earlier date — and the plan does not explain it. “BP” means uncalibrated radiocarbon years before 1950. Most of the pottery across the zone is the Marrón Inciso (incised brown) style, supported by “more than a dozen absolute dates” pointing to what Colombian archaeology calls the Classic Quimbaya period (same, PDF p. 13).

The terraces at Matasanos

At Matasanos there are seven terraces cut into the slope and faced with stone retaining walls. Beside them stands a circular structure about 2.5 metres high and 3 metres across at its flat top, which the plan calls a possible “tower or watchtower” (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 19).

The colonial gold mines

Not everything here is pre-Hispanic. The 2014 survey delimited four large areas “massively altered and excavated until several metres of parent material were removed”, which its authors consider evidently the work of colonial mining and say “could correspond to mines proper” (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 21). The mine tunnels on the maps are what residents call “cuevas de indios”, Indians’ caves (same, PDF p. 22).

One was excavated. The management plan files it under the site name El Rosario; the excavators call the context El Molino, in a small valley where the El Rosario, El Molino and El Oro creeks meet. It was “a dwelling space built at the start of the 17th century, linked to alluvial mining associated with the elites of the city of Santa Fe de Antioquia”, dated 340 ± 60 BP. (The plan puts its own El Rosario on a different confluence — the Oro, Perico and Ruiz creeks — and does not say whether the two are the same place.) In the second half of the 19th century, small-scale miners working gold veins reoccupied it (Obregón, Gómez & Cardona 2005).

The date to be careful with

7150 ± 230 BP (Beta 172858) is the oldest date the plan reports, and it is easy to misread as proof of a 7,000-year-old settlement. It came from El Rosario, a site where “the conclusion is that these are post-Hispanic (colonial and republican) constructions” (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 16).

Who built the stone roads?

One document says so — and it is worth knowing whose. The management plan records that these roads were “described and presented by Vélez and Botero (1997) and Botero and Vélez (1997) as pre-Hispanic in origin, and which Correa (2000) affirms are republican in origin”, then concludes: “Evidently the controversy has not been resolved” (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 20).

The plan’s lead researcher is Sofía Botero Páez, one of the two parties to that dispute — and it still leaves the question open, which is to its credit. But the other side is hard to inspect. The plan’s bibliography gives Correa’s work as an unpublished final research report for the regional environmental authority, Corantioquia, on the middle Santa Elena basin — a neighbouring stretch, not this one. We found no copy of that report, and no other work that cites it. The plan does cite a second Correa work approvingly — a classification of the highland-edge road network made for the Arví regional park in 2000 — but not as the source of the republican claim. So the “controversy” reaches a reader through one side’s summary of it.

Roads are hard to date directly, so the argument runs on indirect evidence:

1. The road is built for walkers. Botero Páez argues that stone steps are “completely unsuited to the needs and characteristics of mules and horses” and “irremediably prevent the use of the wheel”. Her 2006 paper is about Colombian roads in general, not these roads specifically, and she holds that only systematic archaeology can settle the question (Botero Páez 2006, Boletín de Antropología).
2. Someone organised the labour. Obregón-Cardona proposes “as a hypothesis that prestigious local leaders during the Late Period” mobilised the workforce that paved the roads. That paper treats the paving as pre-Hispanic, while dating the labour that built it to the 12th–17th centuries — a window reaching into the colonial period — so the newest peer-reviewed source here does not regard the question as open (Obregón-Cardona 2017).
3. The 1998 declaration is careful. Resolución 797 describes “a wide network of roads between the Cauca and Magdalena valleys, used by the Spaniards on their journeys of conquest and colonisation” (Resolución 797 de 1998, Ministry of Culture). It says used, not built. We quote the resolution itself here, rather than the plan’s copy of it.
4. The city’s own description splits the difference. The Alcaldía calls it a road “of set stone, which shows the skill of Indigenous people and settlers in breaking the mountain barriers”, later walked by mule trains carrying goods to the San Nicolás valley and on to the Magdalena Medio (Alcaldía de Medellín).

Medellín’s land-use plan defines a camino antiguo by its engineering: side walls, a defined roadbed, prepared surfaces, retaining walls, steps and drainage (Acuerdo 48 de 2014, art. 136). The park’s own trail pages describe the Camino de la Cuesta as running “over a pre-Hispanic road” (Parque Arví) — one side of an open question, stated as fact.

Did Cieza de León walk the Camino de Cieza?

No source we read puts him on it. The name is in the 1998 declaration itself, which lists “Laguna Camino de Cieza Matasanos” among the sites (Resolución 797 de 1998), and in the national heritage list (Ministerio de Cultura, BIC list, row 81), and even the road’s identity is unstable: a city heritage site writes “the pre-Hispanic road of la Cuesta or of Cieza” (Raíces), while Medellín’s land-use plan lists “Camino de La Cuesta” and “Camino de Cieza” as two separate entries (Acuerdo 48 de 2014, Anexo 4).

The chronicles are more modest than the legend:

• Cieza writes that “we discovered” the pass into the Aburrá valley with Captain Jorge Robledo. Of the road he says only that “further on a very large ancient road was seen” — passive, with no place named — and he admits the peoples to the east were known “more by repute than from having seen” them (Cieza de León, La crónica del Perú, ch. XVII).
• The famous line that the roads were “wider than those of Cuzco” is not Cieza’s. It is from Juan Bautista Sardela, Robledo’s scribe, who records that the captain “found very large destroyed ancient buildings and roads of cut rock, made by hand, wider than those of Cuzco”. Sardela places this on a sortie out of the Aburrá valley in search of Arví, not on the Santa Elena roads. Robledo, he writes, “did not dare to follow those roads, because whoever had made them must have been a great multitude of people” (Sardela, Relación, printed p. 407). We searched the whole of Cieza’s chronicle: it contains no comparison of these roads to Cuzco.
• Sardela also records the naming of the valley: “This Province is called Avurrá in the Indians’ language, and we named it the Valley of San Bartolomé; here we stayed fifteen days” (same, printed p. 406). Avurrá is the printed spelling of what is now written Aburrá.

Where does the name “Arví” come from?

From a rumour that was never confirmed. Cieza reports that “they affirm there is a great province and valley they say is called Arbi, very populous and rich”, adding: “It has not been discovered, nor do we know more than this rumour.” That passage is in chapter XXII, describing the province of Pícara in the Cauca region, not the Aburrá valley (Cieza de León, La crónica del Perú). The park’s own history page agrees that “no site bearing that name has been found”, and says the park’s name stands “as a reminder of this fruitless search for a mythical treasure” (Parque Arví, Reseña histórica).

How is the site protected?

Four steps, over twenty-one years:

1. 1998: the Ministry of Culture declared the upper Piedras Blancas basin a national Bien de Interés Cultural (BIC), Colombia’s formal heritage designation. It covered 1,537 ha in four polygons that the law treats as Protected Archaeological Areas (ICANH Res. 24/2019; management plan, PDF p. 12). The sites, it said, “constitute valuable scientific support for determining the evolution of the first settlers of eastern Antioquia”.
2. 2013: a Universidad de Antioquia study identified archaeological “crop fields, roads, walls, irrigation ditches and canals across a wide dispersion zone of about 6,000 ha” (ICANH Res. 24/2019).
3. 2018: the Alcaldía de Medellín and EPM submitted an archaeological management plan to ICANH (same).
4. 2019: ICANH declared the enlarged Protected Archaeological Area and approved the plan, citing among its reasons damage to heritage on Cerro Pan de Azúcar “as a result of mass irregular settlement” (same).

Two rules from the 2019 resolution reach visitors. Guided visits to archaeological sites run “with groups of at most 25 people per visit”, in Zones 1 and 2. And no intervention may be made “within an area of three metres around” a mapped vestige — a restriction on works and digging, not on walking past (ICANH Res. 24/2019, arts. 3 and 5).

The plan singles out La Laguna (Laguna de Guarne) as the site “most intensively disturbed and therefore at greatest risk of being irreparably denatured and contaminated”, because of mass tourism (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 19).

How do you visit Parque Arví?

Entering the park is free. As the park puts it, “in Parque Arví you only pay for the services you choose to enjoy”, such as guided and self-guided hiking (Parque Arví, prices).

Getting there by cable car:

1. Take the Metro to Acevedo station, in the north of the city (Parque Arví).
2. Change to Line K of the Metrocable, and ride to Santo Domingo (Parque Arví).
3. Change to Line L (Cable Arví), which has its own separate fare (Parque Arví).

Line L runs 4.6 km in 15 minutes (Metro de Medellín).

Which day is it closed? The park closes on Tuesdays (Parque Arví). The cable car is less clear, and the Metro’s own pages disagree: its Spanish page says only that Line L gives “no service on the first working day of the week”, without naming a day; its English page drops that note and leaves the timetable untranslated, printing “Lunes a viernes” where the Spanish page prints “Martes a viernes” — telling an English reader the line runs on Mondays. The park says the cable runs on the park’s own days. Check both before you travel.

Hours. The park’s visiting page, its “how to get there” page and its site footer all give 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Wednesday to Monday. Only its FAQ, last updated in 2023, says 4:30 p.m. (Parque Arví; FAQ).

Tours and prices, per person, for guided or self-guided hiking:

Prices from the park’s own page, last updated 25 July 2025 and checked in September 2026; the park’s FAQ and its price page do not agree, so we give both (Parque Arví). Tours leave from the El Tambo interpretation centre at the cable car’s arrival plaza, from 9:30 a.m., roughly every 30 minutes, with the last departure around 4:00 p.m., and they run from one to four hours (Parque Arví FAQ).

Trails and sites worth the trip:

• Arqueológico trail — 2.49 km, about 2 hours, low difficulty. It passes roads, fences, enclosed fields and evidence of vein mining (Parque Arví).
• Ancestral trail — 4.7 km, about 2 hours, medium difficulty. It follows the northern branch of the Camino de la Cuesta, “one of the best-preserved ancestral roads in the Park” (Parque Arví).
• Chorro Clarín — free and open access, a 30-minute walk along the main road from the Arví Metrocable station (Parque Arví).
• The finds — a 2020 excavation of 100 m² recovered “more than 4,000 remains of human activity”, which the park dates to between 2,500 and 500 years old. A sample is on view at the park’s José Ignacio Vélez Escobar environmental and cultural centre (Parque Arví).

Stay out of the water. Entering the park’s creeks is not allowed. El Salado creek, at Chorro Clarín, flows into the Piedras Blancas reservoir, which supplies part of the city (Parque Arví FAQ).

Riding up is half the experience in itself — see our guide to the Metrocable.

Which numbers should you not trust?

“Parque Arví covers 16,000 hectares.” Both Wikipedias say it, and it is best read as a boundary confusion rather than a plain error: the same sentence gives 1,760 hectares of forest — within a hectare of the park’s own figure, and the park itself says 1,761 on one page and 1,760 on its FAQ — and describes an area spanning several municipalities. No official source we read gives 16,000 for anything. What they do give: the management plan puts the park at 2,555 hectares under a 2009 resolution (ICANH management plan, PDF p. 7); the park says 1,761 hectares of forest (Parque Arví); the protected archaeological area is 3,200.9 ha; the forest zone is 8,829 ha. Four boundaries, four numbers — quote one and say which.

“People have lived here for 4,000 years” — or 5,000, or 7,000. The park’s 2020 announcement calls human presence for “approximately 4,000 years” undeniable, while saying in the same breath that analysis had to continue “before reaching firm conclusions”; the remains that dig recovered are dated 2,500 to 500 years old (Parque Arví). The management plan says “at least 5,000” (PDF p. 4). Neither supports 7,000: the one date that old came from a site the researchers concluded was built after the Spanish arrived.

“The Camino de Cieza is a pre-Hispanic road that Cieza walked.” Its origin is officially unresolved, the chronicler’s own account places no road at his feet, and even the name refers to different roads in different official documents — all shown in the sections above, with sources.

For the written half of that history, see our guide to El Carnero de Medellín, the city’s first chronicle.

A note on this guide

Every figure here comes from a source we read in the original Spanish; the translations are ours. Where sources disagree, we give both readings rather than pick one silently. Page numbers for the ICANH management plan are PDF pages, which run one ahead of the numbers printed on the page.

Some studies the plan relies on were not available online for us to check: Botero and Vélez (1997), Botero (1999) and Correa (2000). Where we describe their arguments, we are reporting what the management plan says about them, not the originals. Visitor prices and opening hours change; we have given the date of the page each figure came from.

References:

• Botero Páez, S. (lead researcher). Plan Integral de Manejo Arqueológico Parque Regional Ecoturístico Arví para el Área Arqueológica Protegida de Piedras Blancas. Alcaldía de Medellín, EPM, Universidad de Antioquia, Corporación Parque Arví (August 2018). ICANH

• Resolución 24 de 2019 — “Por la cual se declara un Área Arqueológica Protegida de orden nacional en el departamento de Antioquia.” Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia. Diario Oficial 50.887. Ministerio de Cultura, normograma

• “Lista de bienes declarados Bien de Interés Cultural del ámbito nacional.” Ministerio de Cultura (October 2025), row 81. Mincultura

• Acuerdo 48 de 2014 — Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial de Medellín, arts. 136, 139 and Anexo 4. Concejo de Medellín. Alcaldía de Medellín, normograma

• Resolución 1510 de 2010 — redelimitation of the Zona Forestal Protectora del Río Nare. Ministerio de Ambiente, Vivienda y Desarrollo Territorial. Cornare

• Botero Páez, S. (2006). “Elementos para leer un palimpsesto: indígenas, caminos, piedras, mulas y caballos en Colombia.” Boletín de Antropología 20(37): 265–287. Redalyc

• Obregón Cardona, M., Gómez Londoño, L. I. & Cardona Velásquez, L. C. (2005). “Mineros ricos y mineros pobres. Tecnología y cultura material de un contexto minero entre los siglos XVII y XIX en la cuenca alta de la quebrada Piedras Blancas (Antioquia).” Boletín de Antropología 19(36): 11–32. Redalyc

• Obregón-Cardona, M. (2017). “Lugares de habitación prehispánicos en el Valle de Aburrá: grupos domésticos, prácticas y diferencias sociales.” Boletín de Antropología 32(54): 192–223. Redalyc

• Cieza de León, P. de (1553). La crónica del Perú. Madrid: Calpe, 1922 edition, chs. XVII and XXII. Internet Archive

• Sardela, J. B. (c. 1541). “Relación del descubrimiento de las provincias de Antioquia por Jorge Robledo”, printed pp. 406–408. Universidad Nacional de Colombia repository

• “Corregimiento Santa Elena.” Alcaldía de Medellín. Alcaldía de Medellín

• “Territorios: Piedras Blancas.” Raíces — Cultura Silletera, Alcaldía de Medellín. Patrimonio Medellín

• “Línea L: cable turístico Arví.” Metro de Medellín. Metro de Medellín

• “Parque Arví, 10 años trabajando por la sostenibilidad.” Metro de Medellín. Metro de Medellín

• “Hallazgos arqueológicos hacen del Parque Arví un invaluable patrimonio histórico y cultural.” Corporación Parque Arví (2020). Parque Arví

• Caicedo, L. J. “Reseña histórica Arví.” Corporación Parque Arví (2021). Parque Arví

• Parque Arví visitor pages: prices, ¿Qué es?, FAQ, ¿Cuándo visitar?, ¿Cómo llegar?, Camino de la Cuesta, Ancestral, Arqueológico, Chorro Clarín