Salto del Tequendama — the house on the edge

OVERVIEW

The Tequendama Falls drop 132 metres from a rock gorge on the Bogotá River, 30 km south-west of the capital. In 1923 the architect Carlos Arturo Tapias built a mansion directly overlooking them; from 1928 it was the Tequendama Falls Hotel, reached by train from Bogotá. When the river became one of the most contaminated in the world the hotel emptied, and it stood abandoned from the early 1990s for more than two decades before reopening as a museum in 2013.

HISTORY

In Chibcha, the name is said to mean "he who precipitated downward." In Muisca religion the falls were made by the hero Bochica, who struck the rock with his staff to release the water that covered the Bogotá savanna. A second legend tells that, during the Spanish conquest, the people of the area leapt from the falls and turned into eagles to fly to their freedom. The falls were later, as the encyclopedia puts it plainly, a common site for suicides.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The house is the subject of the reports. Colombia's list of reportedly haunted places records claims of a headless man walking the terrace or watching from the windows of the former hotel, and ties them to the falls' long record of suicides. The entry records the place and its reputation as they stand in the record, without the ghost-tour embroidery.

VISITING

The museum is open to visitors; the falls are seen from the roadside viewpoint. The river is heavily polluted — do not go down to it. The falls are also a place where people have died; treat the viewpoint accordingly.