A Walk in El Centro

Caicedo Square is as close as Cali comes to a central plaza.  There are many parks and squares throughout the city.   The whole block is a park.  The white building north of the square (in the background) is a government building.

Another beautiful building across from Caicedo Square to the west.

We also went to the gold museum.

The pre-Columbian people here raised crops of maize, pumpkins, beans, and cotton among other things.  They panned gold out of the rivers and had developed quite an art of hammering the gold into ornaments.  Their leaders were buried with "sumputuous funerary regalia made of gold, stone and pottery".

Gold Adornments

Gold Necklaces

The round things in the above picture are not coins but have holes punched in them to hang from a necklace or similar decoration.

Later people developed casting.  The mold was filled with gold flakes and heated to melt the gold into beads.

Theater diagonally across from Gold Museum.

La Merced was a convent built early in the Spanish era.
We  didn't take a picture of the outside...future blog.
But this stone is a replica from San Augustine, a famous archaeological sight just outside of our mission boundaries.
We sometimes go past La Merced on our way home from church.

The church of San Francisco next to the plaza of San Francisco in the middle of the city.

Back home in our apartment.  We bought the lilies on the street across the river from the office.  They lasted a couple of weeks.