A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY

The Central Mountain Range of Los Andes (‘Cordillera of the Andes’) is the great barrier that interferes and separates the two large fluvial basins of Magdalena and Cauca, with a width that ranges between 50 km and 100 km, the minimum value corresponding precisely to the area where the highway between Armenia and Ibagué runs. This critical road currently reaches its maximum height in the Alto de la Línea, with 3,300 meters above sea level, while its elevation in Armenia is 1,450 meters and of 950 meters in Ibagué. This route runs through the Mountain Range (‘Cordillera’) steep and unstable slopes, following the courses of Santo Domingo, Coello and Combeima rivers in great part of its route, with a path full of sharp curves and steep slopes.

It is known that already in the pre-colonial era there was an Inca Trail in Peru that went towards the lands of Venezuela, passing through Popayán, vercoming the Central Mountain Range (‘Cordillera Central’) through the Paso del Quindío, coinciding with the one currently identified as Alto de La Línea. It was a route prepared for walkers, with steps and cobblestones that are not suitable for mules or horses. Known as the Carthage Trail (‘Camino de Cartago’) during the Viceroyalty (‘Virreinato’) it aimed to encourage private collaboration and roads opening and improvement by granting land but was not much of a success due to the critical difficulties to be overcome. In these times there were no exchanges between territories, as the population units were self-sufficient. It took between 12 and 30 days to cross the Mountain Range (‘Cordillera’).

As Jaime Lopera Gutiérrez quotes in “La Colonización del Quindío”, Simón Bolívar ordered “the opening of a bridle path in the Andes passage, called Quindío, from the city of Cartago to Ibagué” on the 25th of January of 1830, after experiencing first-hand the difficulties of the route a few days earlier during an overnight in Boquía, a stopover on the trip at that time. Various scientists and writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Caldas, Humboldt, Codazzi, Faulhaber and Vergara and Velasco, have made
reference to this pass of the Mountain Range (‘Cordillera’).

The navigation across the Magdalena River and the rail attracted all the attention when it came to transport links until the early twentieth century. Around 1920 there was already some 600 km of paved roads, but not yet connected to each other. The rural population’s displacement processes and their concentration in cities that developed in the second half of the last century (which has increased in recent times) are at the origin of the essential demands that transportation networks in Colombia held today, similarly to what has happened in other parts of the world.

The reduced participation of the railroad mode derives the responsibility of responding to freight transport to the road mode, especially concentrated in the Línea Passage (‘Pasaje de la Línea’).