3/4/13 A Tourist Revival in the Heart of - NYTimes.com

September 14, 2012 A Tourist Revival in the Heart of Bogotá By JOSHUA HAMMER IT was a windswept Saturday in the Candelaria neighborhood of Bogotá, and the Plaza de Bolívar was packed. Troubadours, jugglers, balloon vendors, pineapple sellers and Amazonian fruit-juice pressers vied for the attention of tourists. Grizzled Andean Indians led children around on llamas. Pilgrims gathered at the Bogotá Cathedral, a soaring Gothic structure that contains the remains of the city’s 16th-century founder, the conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. Beside a statue of the South American liberator Simon Bolívar, a tattooed comedian held an audience of hundreds rapt.

The scene was dramatically different from the last time I was here, five years ago, when the hemisphere’s longest-running insurgency was raging. Back then, the plaza, almost devoid of tourists, was dominated by a tent pitched by the father of a soldier held captive for seven years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of , the FARC. The father had spent the previous two months marching through the country, wrapped symbolically in chains, to rally support for a negotiated end to the war.

Colombia, under its former president Álvaro Uribe, chose to fight instead, and the strategy has paid off. Since my last visit, the insurgency has wound down. The FARC freed its last police and military hostages in April, and peace talks between the government and the FARC have been announced.

Now 8,700-foot-high Bogotá, once a crime-ridden metropolis plagued by sporadic guerrilla attacks, and a major distribution point for the country’s then-flourishing cocaine trade, has emerged as a cultural capital. La Candelaria, a centuries-old quarter of restored one- and two- story pastel-painted houses and cobblestone streets, is at the center of Bogotá’s — and Colombia’s — tourist revival.

I first discovered La Candelaria in the mid-1990s, when I was based in Buenos Aires as South America bureau chief for Newsweek. Back then, it was home to many freelance war correspondents, drawn by the cheap rents and the frisson of danger that came with livingM oOnRE IN TRAVEL the fringes of a combat zone. (The violence has not completely subsided: in May 2012, in9 Spring Breaks, From Budget Bogotá, an assailant threw a bomb at a former government minister, killing his driver antdo a Beyond bodyguard and injuring at least 39 others.) Read More » travel.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/travel/a-tourist-revival-in-the-heart-of-bogota.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print 1/5 3/4/13 A Tourist Revival in the Heart of Bogotá - NYTimes.com Those journalists typically lived in apartments with high ceilings, thick stone walls and charming courtyards. In between visits to the conflict-wracked countryside, they would participate in La Candelaria’s energetic social life. The parties I attended during that era often went on all night, and they were not infrequently juiced by the very illicit substance that was fueling the conflict. More than once I would spot the host of one of these affairs pull out a fistful of cocaine.

Today La Candelaria is more law-abiding and upscale, with new restaurants, hotels, cafes and art galleries interspersed among the old houses and beat-up bars. Once-dilapidated homes have been brightly repainted. The neo-Classical facade of the Teatro de Cristóbal Colón, the national opera house designed by the Italian architect Pietro Cantini and opened in 1892, underwent major renovations two years ago. Perhaps the most impressive recent addition to the neighborhood is the Botero Museum, which opened in a handsome villa in 2000 after the Medellín-born figurative artist Fernando Botero gave 208 works, including 123 of his own and 85 by international painters, to the Bank of the Republic’s art collection.

Night life, while not as lively as that of the more fashionable Zona Rosa, farther north, attracts people from across Bogotá. University students toss down glasses of chicha, a potent alcoholic beverage distilled from maize, in lively bars that spill off a graffiti-splattered square called the Chorro de Quevado. Once scorned as the drink of the “Indians,” chicha has become increasingly popular in Colombia. New restaurants, serving Argentine, French, Spanish and Colombian cuisine, draw crowds all week.

Yet despite the flood of tourists and all the cultural activities, much of La Candelaria still feels like a tight-knit pueblo. “I like the old village ambience, the architecture and the Spanish-style tiled roofs,” I was told by Roberto Franco, an author and historian who has for years lived in a pastel home that dates back to Spanish-ruled Colombia. “It may be the only authentic place of Bogotá, a place where one gets to know the neighbors and has the opportunity to drink coffee and chat, or play a game of chess.”

I felt that pueblo atmosphere as I wandered around the neighborhood on a July afternoon. I trudged up a steep street, pausing every hundred feet or so to catch my breath in the thin Andean air. Neat rows of houses, a palette of pinks, ochers, yellows, reds and greens, lined each side street. Some were decorated with cartoon eyes and other iconography; wooden shutters and filigreed balconies adorned others. On one alley, where grass and weeds poked between the cobblestones, three elderly men played backgammon on a flimsy table. Smoke puffed out of chimneys protruding from orange-tile rooftops. On the more commercial streets, locals packed cheap lunch establishments.

travel.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/travel/a-tourist-revival-in-the-heart-of-bogota.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print 2/5 3/4/13 A Tourist Revival in the Heart of Bogotá - NYTimes.com La Candelaria’s origins go back to the 1530s, when Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, an Andalusian adventurer who some believe was the model for Cervantes’s Don Quixote, trekked through the Amazon rain forest and the high cordillera, losing almost all his men before arriving on a high plateau populated by Indians. Gonzalo Jiménez called his new possession the New City of Granada, which was later changed to Santa Fé de Bogotá, and finally just Bogotá.

Over the next century, the Spanish colonials laid out their city on a grid pattern that remains largely intact. Wide boulevards, called carreras, where the settlers once raced their horses, intersect a dozen narrow streets, or calles, many paved with uneven cobblestones. The calles rise toward verdant mountains, Guadalupe and , both Catholic pilgrimage sites. As Bogotá expanded to the north, the original city became merely a neighborhood, and the name La Candelaria, taken from one of the first churches in Bogotá, Our Lady of the Candlemas, stuck.

A sense of history permeates La Candelaria. After an hours-long climb around the neighborhood, I ducked into La Puerta Falsa, a bakery and restaurant that opened in 1816, at the height of Colombia’s turbulence. The tiny establishment has adobe walls and wood ceiling beams. I waited 20 minutes for space to open upstairs, but it was worth it. Settling onto a battered wooden bench beside a family of four, I ordered hot tamales stuffed with chicken and corn, all wrapped inside a banana leaf; a tangy citrus drink called feijoa; and chocolate completo, hot chocolate served with bread and cheese. I could imagine Latin American revolutionaries eating the same thing 200 years ago.

Around the corner stand some of the major landmarks of early 19th-century Colombia, when the Spanish colony was seething with revolutionary spirit. Here is the Teatro de Cristóbal Colón, and beside it is one of my favorite hotels in Latin America: the Hotel de la Ópera, patched together from a pair of 19th-century town houses once used by Simon Bolívar’s bodyguards. It is a classic piece of colonial architecture, with butterscotch adobe walls and a leafy courtyard where a burbling fountain provides a soothing accompaniment to breakfast. Early that morning, I chatted with the hotel clerk, an immigrant from Tijuana, Mexico. I told him I’d stayed at the hotel five years ago. “During the bad times,” he said, nodding sagely. “It’s a new Colombia now.”

ACROSS from the hotel is the Palacio de San Carlos, a grand marble structure, now the Foreign Ministry, from which Simon Bolívar once ruled a swath of South America. In 1814, after conquering Caracas and being proclaimed El Libertador, Bolívar marched into Bogotá. Five years later he declared independence for present-day Colombia.

travel.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/travel/a-tourist-revival-in-the-heart-of-bogota.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print 3/5 3/4/13 A Tourist Revival in the Heart of Bogotá - NYTimes.com Bolívar settled in 1826 in La Candelaria, where he declared himself president over heated opposition and, in 1828, survived an assassination attempt. He escaped through a large ground-floor window in the Palacio de San Carlos. He had been warned about the plot by his lover, Manuela Sáenz, who thereafter was known in Bogotá circles as “the liberator of the liberator.”

The Andean afternoon had turned chilly, and the crowds at the Plaza de Bolívar thinned out. I had the huge space’s buildings to myself. I strolled past The Congress, a grand Italianate edifice, and the modern concrete Palace of Justice. In 1985, 35 members of the April 19 Movement, known as M-19, stormed the previous court that stood here and seized hundreds of hostages. More than 100 people, including 11 Supreme Court justices and all but one of the guerrillas, died in a 28-hour siege that gutted the structure. Beside the court was city hall, an early 20th-century, French-influenced structure. Bogotá’s new mayor, a former M-19 guerrilla, can look from his office upon the scene of his ex-comrades’ downfall.

This stark tableau of political turbulence gave way to a timeless scene: I had stumbled into a crowded market, a stone’s throw from the plaza. Indian women swathed in blankets sold alpaca sweaters, and lured passers-by to their displays of sweets with chants of “Dulce, dulce, dulce.” Weaving through the shoppers, I eyed the Andean foothills looming above the neighborhood, and, in the fading light, strolled back to the comforts of the Hotel de la Ópera.

IF YOU GO

The Hotel de la Ópera, next door to the Teatro de Cristóbal Colón (Calle 10, No. 5-72; 57-1- 336-2066; hotelopera.com.co), is housed in two adjoining 19th-century town houses and has 20 well-appointed rooms overlooking a courtyard. There’s a restaurant and bar, and a small pool and health club. The current rate for a double room is 307,000 pesos, or $175, at 1,777 Colombian pesos to the dollar.

Hotel Casa Deco (Calle 12c, No. 2-36, ; 57-1-283-7032; hotelcasadeco.com) is a modern 20- room inn. A single costs 123,000 pesos; a master suite 600,000 pesos.

Just off the Plaza de Bolívar is La Puerta Falsa (Calle 11, No. 6-50; no phone), an unassuming place that serves some of the best tamales in the city. Other specialties include hot chocolate and cheese, and a wide variety of exotic fresh-squeezed fruit juices from the Amazon. A meal for two costs around 28,000 pesos.

Opened in 1998, Mi Viejo (Calle 11, No. 5-41; 57-1-566-6128; restaurantemiviejo.com) serves fine Argentine food. Dinner for two, including parilla-cooked steaks, a bottle of wine and a dessert of dulce de leche, is about 200,000 pesos. travel.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/travel/a-tourist-revival-in-the-heart-of-bogota.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print 4/5 3/4/13 A Tourist Revival in the Heart of Bogotá - NYTimes.com El Gato Gris (Carrera 1a, No. 13-12; 57-1-342-1716) is a beautiful two-story restaurant overlooking La Candelaria’s original square. Dinner for two costs about 90,000 pesos.

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