Colombia is home to San Agustín, an archaeological site known for monumental stone statues.
San Agustín Archaeological Park lies in the Colombian Andes in the upper Magdalena River region. It contains hundreds of carved stone monuments, including anthropomorphic figures, animals, tomb guardians and ritual sculptures. The carvings were produced by a pre-Columbian society whose name is not known from surviving written records.
The monuments are associated with funerary and ceremonial landscapes, including burial mounds and tombs. Many sculptures combine human and animal features, making their meanings difficult to interpret with certainty. The culture flourished over a long period before Spanish arrival.
UNESCO inscribed the archaeological park as a World Heritage Site in 1995. San Agustín is separate from the Muisca heritage around Bogotá and from Peru’s better-known Inca sites; its distinctive stone statuary belongs to an earlier Colombian tradition.