Guatapé is a lakeside town in the hills east of Medellín, and its fame rests on two things: the colour of its streets and a giant rock. The houses are decorated along the lower walls with painted reliefs known as zócalos, showing scenes of family life, animals, flowers and local trades, and every street is a gallery in bright blues, reds, greens and yellows. The effect is playful and the town takes it seriously, with each building competing to look better than its neighbours.
The rock is El Peñol, a huge granite monolith, a single mass of stone rising some two hundred metres above the water. A stairway of several hundred steps has been built into a crack on its side, and the climb to the top rewards you with a view over a maze of islands, peninsulas and green water. The lake itself is a reservoir, created in the 1970s when a river was dammed for hydroelectric power, flooding the valley and the old town of El Peñol, whose people were moved to a new settlement. The drowned landscape explains the jigsaw shape of the shoreline, with hills turned into islands.
The ride from Medellín takes you up out of the Aburrá valley and over the hills of the Oriente, along a good paved road with long bends, views of rolling green farmland and a constant stream of buses, trucks and weekend traffic. On Sundays and holidays the road is crowded with visitors, and patience is needed behind slow vehicles. In the early morning it is calmer and cooler, and the light on the hills is soft.
Guatapé is a town of about five thousand and has fuel and food, with plenty of restaurants serving the local plate of beans, rice, pork, egg and avocado, along with fresh trout from the lake. Boats take visitors around the reservoir, and a stroll along the waterfront is pleasant at sunset. The climate is mild, around twenty degrees in the day, with showers common in the afternoon, so a rain jacket is useful. The best time to climb the rock is the morning, before the haze rises.