El Peñón de Guatapé

Where it sits. El Peñón de Guatapé is a bare granite monolith rising roughly 220 metres from a plateau of green pasture and pine about 79 kilometres east of Medellín, on the boundary between the municipalities of Guatapé and El Peñol. Its summit reaches about 2,135 metres above sea level, and from the top the land below dissolves into the fingers and islands of a huge man-made reservoir. The rock is an outlier of the Antioqueño batholith, a vast body of igneous rock that cooled deep underground more than sixty million years ago; the softer material around it eroded away and left this dome exposed, streaked black with rainwater and patched with bromeliads in its cracks. It is visible from thirty kilometres away and is the single most recognisable natural landmark in Antioquia.

The story behind it. The Tahamí people, who occupied this region before the Spanish, treated the rock as sacred and called it mojarrá or mujará. For centuries it was regarded as unclimbable — a smooth dome with a single vertical fissure splitting one flank. In July 1954 a local man, Luis Villegas López, with two companions, worked his way up that crack over five days by wedging planks against its walls, and the route they proved became the line of the masonry staircase that zigzags up it today. Counts of the steps differ depending on where you start and stop — 649, 659 and 740 are all quoted locally, and the discrepancy has become part of the folklore. On the flank, an unfinished white "GI" survives from a 1940s attempt by Guatapé residents to paint the town's name up the rock, stopped by furious neighbours from El Peñol who claimed it as theirs.

The lake below. The water that makes the view is not natural. Between 1970 and 1978 the utility company Empresas Públicas de Medellín dammed the Río Nare for hydroelectricity, creating the Embalse Peñol-Guatapé and flooding some 2,200 hectares of farmland — including the old town of El Peñol, whose 600 or so buildings were abandoned and whose population was moved to a purpose-built replacement town. A cross set on a small island marks where the church stood. The reservoir still supplies a substantial share of Colombia's electricity, and its drowned valleys are what give the view from the summit its distinctive look: hundreds of green peninsulas and islets in still black water, an inland archipelago that did not exist before living memory.

On camera. The Peñón has no famous feature-film credit, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is often lumped into "Narcos tourism" itineraries that have nothing to do with it. What it has instead is ubiquity in the visual language of Colombian tourism: it fronts national campaigns, appears in television travel programming, in music videos and in a relentless stream of drone footage and social posts, and it is one of the images that reshaped Antioquia's reputation abroad after the 1990s. The photograph everybody comes for is the same one — the stairway seen from the base, and the reservoir seen through the summit railings — which means the interest for a photographer is largely in timing: dawn haze on the water, or the moment the afternoon cumulus builds over the far hills.

What you actually see today. A ticket booth at the base fronts a strip of stalls selling arepas, mango with salt and lime, and mango biche. The climb up the fissure takes fifteen to thirty minutes depending on fitness and traffic, on stairs that are steep, uneven and narrow enough that ascending and descending traffic must negotiate. At the top there is a three-storey brick viewing tower, several kiosks selling drinks and michelada, and a small chapel. The panorama covers the reservoir, the town of Guatapé's coloured houses on its inlet, and the surrounding hills of pine and eucalyptus plantation. Vertigo is a genuine consideration: the staircase is exposed and the handrails modest.

Getting there and timing. Buses to Guatapé leave Medellín's Terminal del Norte roughly every hour and take two hours, dropping passengers on the main road about two kilometres from the base, where tuk-tuks wait. Weekends and Colombian holidays bring long queues on the stairs; a weekday morning is a different experience entirely. This is highland tropics, so temperatures sit around 18–24°C year-round, with the wettest spells from April to May and September to November — clouds can erase the view within minutes. There is no accessible route to the summit, and no cable car. Sturdy shoes, water and a rain layer cover everything you need.