I don’t like heights; Dan does. He heard about a tour of one of the churches in Manizales and it sounded interesting. I didn’t realize most of the tour was going to be outside…on the roof and steeple!
We went on the tour in the evening because that is when the next one was. There were 20-30 people in the tour which was in Spanish. They talked about the history of the church. I had previously commented to Dan about how many stained glass windows there were but I was way off on the count. There are actually somewhere around 150 windows (I forget the exact number and couldn’t find it on the internet. The church took 11 years to build, largely because of needing materials. The steeple is 106 meters (347 feet) tall and we were almost at the top when we were out on the small area that surrounds the steeple. It is the tallest church tower in Colombia.
After viewing the inside of the church we went upstairs and could look down on the service that was being conducted. Then we watched a short video about the church and then the “fun” began.
We went up some stairs that were lit but not always well. Then we went outside along the roof in an area that was caged in but still scary, especially since it was night. I was ready to quit but when I saw the stairs below I could see that they were not really hard to climb, just lots of them.
The view was beautiful once we got out to the observation area. There were enough people in the tour that we circled the steeple and had to wait while each person/group took pictures so we were out there at least 15 minutes.