Casa Museo Salto del Tequendama
The mansion on the cliff was built in the 1920s as a hotel for people who came to look at the falls. It closed when the river that makes the falls became the drain for Bogota, stood empty for decades, and acquired the reputation that keeps its photograph circulating. A foundation restored it and reopened it in 2013 as a museum about the river and the forest.
Field Guide Entry
The hotel
The building went up between 1923 and 1927, designed by Carlos Arturo Tapias with Pablo de la Cruz and Joseph Martens, on the edge of the gorge at Tequendama. It served the railway traffic coming out to see the falls, at a time when this was the day trip from the capital.
The river
The Bogota River runs through the city before it reaches the drop, and through the twentieth century it took the city's sewage and industrial waste with it. The falls kept their scale and lost everything else. The hotel's business went with the water quality, and the building was shut by the end of the century.
Empty
It stood abandoned above the gorge for decades, pink stucco going green, windows out, floors open to the weather. The reputation attached in that period: a building associated with deaths at the falls, and the standard set of stories about what people have seen in it. Those stories are the reason most people abroad have seen a picture of it.
The museum
The GEP Foundation approached the owners in 2009, the Granja Ecologica El Porvenir acquired the property, and restoration ran with support from the National University of Colombia, the European Union, the French embassy, and the French Development Agency. It opened in 2013 as Casa Museo Tequendama, Biodiversidad y Cultura.
The exhibitions are about the Bogota River, the cloud forest, and the Muisca account of Bochica striking the rock to drain the flooded savanna, which is the oldest story attached to this gorge and the one the museum leads with. Cleaning up the river is a live public works project, and the museum is arguing for it.
Visiting Information
The museum opens on weekends and public holidays only, from 9am to 4pm, with tickets at 15,000 Colombian pesos and children under 8 free. Booking ahead is not required and tickets are sold at the door, though the website takes them in advance.
Visits run as a guided tour through the exhibitions and the building, with the arboretum outside. Allow a couple of hours for both.
The falls run hardest in the rainy seasons, which are roughly April to May and October to November. The river below is polluted and the smell reaches the terraces on warm days, which is part of what the museum is about rather than an aside to it. It is about an hour from Bogota by road, and taxi apps will not always come back out for the return, so arranging the trip both ways is worth doing before setting off.
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