MONUMENT TO LA GAITANA NEIVA HUILA COLOMBIA

This sculpture built in 1974, was inspired by the history of Guaitipán, today known as the Cacica Gaitana. It represents the rejection of a dignified and haughty race in the face of the cruelty and savagery of the Spanish invaders who overwhelmed it with blood and fire, but did not defeat it.

According to the sculptor, this monument is of multiple symbolism: the rebellion against foreign oppression, the confrontation between the almost vegetable and purely animal world of La Gaitana and her warrior and the European civilization symbolized in a man almost all of iron, Añasco and the Centaur, the result of miscegenation, who falls carrying in his hand the cross and the sword.

Horses symbolize that element of conquest that, without detracting from the value of man, gives the invaders an overwhelming superiority over the Aborigines.

The figure of La Gaitana has two faces: a kind, loving, tender, kind, motherly person who looks at the sun and symbolizes the mother, the wife, the brotherly feeling of every woman. The other: warrior, fierce, untamed, full of anger and revenge, with her hair in the air and an attitude of war, is rebellion, opposition to the Spanish yoke, the explosion of repressed freedom, the offended heroine in the most expensive feeling.

The figure of La Gaitana rests in a young jaguar or tigrillo with powerful claws and sharp tusks in an attack attitude, which hints at the exotic and exuberant nature of the new continent. The warrior who dominates and crowns the ensemble, armed with a bow still taut from the accurate shot, wears a mask of hawk or eagle, bird of prey and swift flight, an animal adored by the aborigines and which they believed to become after death.

MONUMENT TO THE GAITANA SCULPTOR: Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt

LOCATION: Avenida Circunvalación calle 5ª.