Monumento India Catalina
Bronze figure of an enslaved interpreter, cast three and a half meters tall in a feathered headdress.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Monumento a India Catalina in Cartagena traces a girl taken from a beach near this coast at around fourteen, baptized in Santo Domingo, and brought back by 1533 as interpreter for conquistador Pedro de Heredia as he founded the city. It follows the melting down of a solid gold porcupine dug from a burial mound along the Sinú River, after months of Catalina leading Heredia's men village to village, and the split of that gold between the royal treasury and the soldiers who dug it up. Records from later years show she took Heredia, by then also her lover, to court over gold he owed her.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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