Plazuela San Ignacio is not the most romantic park in Colombia’s second city Medellin, but if you happen to come across it as you wander around the city you might as well stop for a look.
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The small, busy, pigeon-filled park in the center of Medellin is not really the place to escape the intense delirium of the city. It is not the place to ponder the enchantment of Colombia while sipping a freshly brewed coffee. It’s not the place to sit and watch as ripe Colombian girls swing their plump hips by in the spring sunshine. But if you happen to end up there all is not lost, there are definitely some more attractive aspects to San Ignacio than there seems to be at first glance.
The little plaza has the same discordant clamor as the rest of Medellin’s city center streets, with street vendors shouting from their stalls, cars beeping, and the roaring of motorbikes. And it is full of pigeons. Pigeons everywhere – ratty, dirty, grey ones with the classic club-foot worn by these feral pests in cities all over the world.
But look a little closer, and crouched among this feathery plague are little old men locked in earnest chess matches, while others stand behind and watch the play unfold. The population of the park is generally over 60-years-old, and plenty of interesting characters pass their days loitering in the busy plaza the way the elderly generally do.
Looking up above the commotion of the plaza the park shows its important place in Medellin history. The baroque facade of the San Ignacio church stands sandwiched between the neoclassical exteriors of the cloister of San Ignacio and the University of Antioquia.
All three were founded by the Franciscans in 1803 when the city of Medellin recognized the need for a college for the city’s bourgeois. The church was finished in 1809, but the cloister and the university building were left unfinished when they were abandoned by the Franciscans after the country gained independence. In 1886 the complex was given to the Jesuits to develop as a church and college.
The University has a cool and peaceful silence after the cacophony of the plaza. A studious hush pervades the cool halls and the quiet courtyards, which the visitor can enter free of charge for a welcome relief from the mayhem outside.
Colombia’s first president General Francisco de Paula Santander, who founded a college in the building when the Franciscans had still failed to finish and occupy it 20 years after the foundations were struck, is commemorated with a pigeon-covered monument in the plaza in front of the church of San Ignacio.
The park is also often the site for cultural activities which include musical gatherings and artisan markets, where you can feast on sweets and arequipa waffles in a pleasant bustling market atmosphere. In which case you will be contentedly disposed towards the little square having fortuitously avoided the scourge of pigeons and everyday raucous disorder of the little Parque San Ignacio.