This strange, but beautiful, park in El Centro contains 300 concrete needles, of different heights, which together create a kind of artificial forest.
Plaza de Cisnero is also referred to as Parque de la Luz because at night the needles light up. Indeed, Plaza de Cisnero could easily be a setting from a Stars Wars film. The park also includes bamboo gardens, water pools and a random distribution of chairs and benches.
Plaza de Cisnero was conceived by the former mayor of Medellín, Sergio Fajardo, and like many of his projects aimed at transforming neglected areas of the city, it was surrounded by controversy due to spiralling costs. But, you only have to look at some of the nearby streets to imagine how bad the park was before.
If you face the EPM library and look to your left, you can see a railway station which is no longer in use. Plaza de Cisnero inherited its name from its designer; a Cuban railway engineer called Francisco Javier Cisneros who died in 1898. |
