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Haunted places · Hotels and inns

The Hotel above Tequendama Falls

When
since c. 1990 date reconstructed from later accounts
Where
Casa Museo Salto del Tequendama, San Antonio del Tequendama, Colombia
Verdict
Legend

An elegant hotel on the brink of a 433-foot waterfall near Bogotá stood empty for years. A place that for decades drew the desperate, it is said to be haunted.

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4.58°, -74.30° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

Tequendama Falls is a waterfall on the Bogotá River about 20 miles from the Colombian capital; the water drops 433 feet. According to the Muisca, it was created by the hero Bochica, who struck the rock with his staff to free the waters flooding the savanna. Another legend says that during the Conquest Indigenous people leapt from here to turn into eagles and fly to freedom. Between 1923 and 1927 a grand French-style building went up on the very edge of the cliff, reached by train from Bogotá – first a station, then a luxury hotel for wealthy Bogotanos, and finally a restaurant. Pollution of the river left it abandoned from the 1990s for more than twenty years. The falls also had a darker reputation: from the 1930s, for several decades, Bogotá residents came here to take their own lives, as “El Tiempo” and “El Espectador” regularly reported. Guides say ghosts still roam the abandoned hotel, a “suicide rock” juts over the abyss, and across the river stands a statue known as the Virgin of the Suicides.

Witnesses

The Bogotá press from the 1930s and 1940s (including “El Tiempo” and “El Espectador”); guides and visitors to the museum. The site's history was described by the historian Juan Pablo Conto in the University of the Andes magazine Cerosetenta (2013).

Explanations and hypotheses

Behind the ghost stories lie real human tragedies that the press reported for decades – which is exactly why the place stirs such strong feelings. The hotel's decline was caused by pollution of the Bogotá River, which brought the stench of sewage, not by a curse. Since late 2012 the building has been the Casa Museo Salto del Tequendama, devoted to biodiversity and the rescue of the river; the French government supported its restoration. An empty, crumbling house on the edge of an abyss, often shrouded in mist, was the perfect backdrop for legends, and photographs from those years still circulate online as “Colombia's most haunted hotel.”

Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.

Sources

  1. Cerosetenta (Universidad de los Andes) – Los suicidas del Tequendama (2013)
  2. Colombia Reports – Historic Colombian hotel to be converted into museum

More: Wikipedia (en)