Monument to the RaceMonumento a la Raza

Monument to the Race, known locally as Monumento a la Raza, is a 38 m bronze-and-concrete sculpture completed in 1988 by Rodrigo Arenas Betancur, rising between Medellín’s government buildings as a civic meditation on Antioquia’s origins. Its surging, intertwined bodies—horsemen, mothers, laborers, and the fallen—compress conquest, faith, agriculture, solidarity, and death into a single narrative shaped by Indigenous roots and colonial legacy. With the artist’s ashes at its base, it reads as both public emblem and personal memorial.