Monument to the RaceMonumento a la RazaRodrigo Arenas Betancur

Rising between Medellin’s government buildings, this 38 m bronze-and-concrete monument (1988) unfolds as an allegory of Antioquia’s origins and upheavals. A dense surge of intertwined figures—riders, mothers, laborers, and the dead—presses conquest, faith, agriculture, solidarity, and loss into a single, upward-driving mass shaped by Indigenous roots and colonial legacy. Arenas Betancur’s ashes are said to rest at its base, giving the work the weight of both civic emblem and private memorial.