Tucurrique and Guayabo

On Monday February 18, Eric, Michele and I headed out for Tucurrique, Turrialba and the Guayabo National Monument.  The drive was beautiful.  The landscape starts looking different close to Tucurrique and is warmer.  It was a wider, flatter plain and we saw a lot more palm trees. 

We went over several beautiful streams.  This one that ran close to the road had a new footbridge that I would have been a little leery of trying. 

Somewhere along the road between Tucurrique and Turialba, we ran across the beautiful Lake Angostura.  It was built to generate hydroelectric power.   

We stopped at Hotel Casa Turire on its shore for a look around.  We think the hotel must have originally been a colonial plantation.  The interior was lovely with beautiful old tile everywhere.  We drove through miles and miles of sugar cane and coffee fields around the hotel. 

The grounds were beautifully landscaped.  I just loved this bloom.

After leaving the hotel, we drove on to the bustling city of Turrialba down below Volcan Turrialba that we can see from Ray and Michele's farm.  We quickly passed on through the city and headed up the mountain towards Guayabo National Monument.  We stopped for lunch at a roadside soda.  The food was excellent and we got to enjoy it under the shade of some fruit trees - maybe guayabos, we weren't sure.  So far we have found that in Costa Rica, the food in these roadside sodas is hard to beat. 

Guayabo National Monument was, of course, located at the end of a twisty, turny, bumpy dirt road high on the southern slope of the volcano.  We took a nice walk through the rain forest to get to the site.  This was our first glimpse of the archeological site.

The site was said to have been inhabited from 1500 BC to 1400 AD. 

The site was remarkable in that it had a system of stone aqueducts that brought water into the city to be stored in stone-lined cisterns.

Water is still running into the cisterns.

The circular stone areas were foundations of conical wooden structures.

The entire site, which is only partially excavated, is thought to have supported a population of 10,000 at one time.  The causeway is believed to have extended between 2.5 and 7.5 miles from the main town. 

Here is a diorama that shows what this portion of the town may have looked like.

Gauyabo was a amazing site.