Qualla: Jardin

Jardin: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CarUno, CC BY-SA 4.0. Somewhere in southern Antioquia, a man is riding a tiny cart pulled by a motorcycle. The cart is called a moto-raton, a motor mouse, and it can take you to a trout pond, or to the village of an Indigenous Embera-Chami community, or just around the main plaza in circles while you laugh. Jardin has twenty thousand people, two cable cars, more than twenty outdoor cafes on a single square, and a neo-Gothic basilica built from river stones. The Lonely Planet guide books will tell you that Jardin is charming. The people there will tell you it has simply forgotten to change.

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Image: CarUno | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jardin: A Town Time Left Alone

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Felipe Restrepo Acosta, CC BY-SA 4.0. Founded in 1864, Jardin sits in a valley at the southernmost edge of the Antioquia department, tucked against the Western Cordillera of the Colombian Andes. It was settled during the Colonizacion Antioquena, a great wave of migration that carried families southward from central a...

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Image: Felipe Restrepo Acosta | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jardin: The Plaza

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kamilokardona, CC BY-SA 3.0. The center of life in Jardin is a single square, the Parque Principal, declared a National Monument along with its basilica. From its stone-paved floor, twenty-odd cafes and bars spill their wood-and-leather chairs into the open air. People sit there. That is the main activity. T...

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Image: Kamilokardona | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jardin: Cable Cars and Countryside

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rolf Lind Jensen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Jardin was one of the first small Colombian towns to install a modern cable car system. The idea was practical: help farmers from the mountain villages of La Selva, La Linda, and La Salada haul their goods into town without a long walk down winding roads. It also boosted tourism....

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Image: Rolf Lind Jensen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jardin: The Country Around

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit XalD, CC BY-SA 4.0. The hills beyond town hide waterfalls, caves, and creeks with rainbow trout. A three-hour walk leads to the Cueva del Esplendor, a cave with a waterfall plunging through a hole in its ceiling. Five kilometers from the plaza, ponds stocked with trout let visitors catch their own d...

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Image: XalD | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jardin: What to Buy, How to Carry It

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Sylx100 at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. The most distinctive local product is the Carriel Paisa, a leather handbag with a long shoulder strap. It has the look of something out of a nineteenth-century American western, which is probably not accidental: Antioquian settler culture shared a certain frontier imagination wit...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Sylx100 at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Jardin: Sleeping and Staying

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Scabredon~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. For a town of fewer than twenty thousand people, Jardin has an unusual number of places to sleep. Over forty hotels operate here, more than you would find in municipalities ten times larger. The lodgings range from simple guesthouses to country fincas that once belonged to coffee...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Scabredon~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain