Last days in Medellin

El Castillo is a stately home built in 1930 by the Echeverri family. At that time the area around the estate was farm land. Now it is the neighbourhood of El Poblado. The estate has extensive formal gardens, designed in a French style - symmetrical fountains and planting beds. The house looks like a castle and is a marvel of hardwood floors, doors and paneling, coffered ceilings with ornately carved mouldings and full of antiques and paintings, both originals and reproductions. We toured the gardens first and saw scarlet macaws, humming birds, flycatchers, tanagers and a few birds we couldn't identify.

View of the house from the gardens

 

The formal gardens at El Castillo

 

We often rode on the metro system in Medellin, which is modern and very well organized. The system includes a section that goes so steeply up hill that a regular rail car was not possible, so they have Metrocable, which is a cable car line going up into two neighbourhoods. We rode the metro cable to the last station where we transfered to another cable car system which takes you to a park on the top of the mountain on the east side of Medellin. Parque Arvi is a huge area with a varitey of activities, but we were mainly interested in a hike and some birdwatching. Maria and her mother Christina went along on the cable car ride, but did not come hiking with us. We did a 3 hour hike and near the end of the hike we got caught in a series of thunderstorms.

 

The cable car from one of the stations

 

On the trail in Parque Arvi, just before the rain

 

Our final tourist adventure in Medellin was to visit the zoo, which Maria told us has some good bird displays. We did get to see a few birds that are very difficult to see in the wild. The cock-of-the-rock is one of the birds that is a real challenge to see in its natural habitat. This bird puts on a spectacular mating display at about 6:00 am daily during mating season. When we were in Mindo, Ecuador it was mating season and the birding hikes to see this display left at 4:00 amd and hiked through the forest in the dark for a couple of hours looking for the birds. That was a bit more than we were prepared to do, so we were happy to have a look at the bird, even though it was at the zoo. We also saw scarlet Ibis, and three kinds of toucans.

Flamingos at the zoo

Cock-of-the-rock

 

Little Parrots that were very tame

 

We had a wonderful time visiting Carlos and Maria, being included in family activities and being fed all manner of Colombian foods that we might not have tried on our own. We visited markets where people sell their produce from little stalls and supermarkets similar to Superstore or Sobeys, but with totally different products.

Look at the size of those papayas! And they are so delicious!

 

From Medellin we flew to the caribbean coast to spend a few days at the beach before returing to Canada.