The hoarding that reads "The Gold Museum is Changing" does no more than indicate that something is going on behind the walls of the place that has shown the country and the whole world the wonders of Colombia's pre-Hispanic universe. It is an invitation to stop and look, to see that a gigantic building covered in grey marble has rised up behind the traditional museum, which won the National Architecture Prize after it opened in 1968. That is the image you get from outside: the vault has grown! The compact building denotes that something of immense value lies behind those facades. And this is true, in fact. For it is the archaeological and anthropological heritage of the nation.

And to help assimilate the idea, the respective alterations: new building, a new way of telling the story, new technological resources, new services. In short, a new museum. The latest museographical techniques in hermetic showcases, optic fibre lighting and invisible supports for objects, signs and bases, but above all, in the concept of the rooms: a clear and open setting, where it is the gold that takes centre stage.

To these formal innovations has been added a new account of the history of metallurgy, one which views it as a living cycle: gold is extracted, worked, used, symbolised, and then offered up so it can return to the earth. And to enable the images to be studied in greater depth, there are pedagogical animations, a place where knowledge can be explored, multidisciplinary cultural activities, and a multimedia room connected to the museum's technological "brain", so that visitors can investigate, look around, and be tempted by somewhere they will feel they have to visit again.

Because 50,000 gold, pottery, wood, stone and textile objects make up the collection, and are the result of a need to preserve objects that for centuries were plundered and acquired by various public and private entities, and even given away and sold to foreign governments, which today proudly display them in their museums and collections. When the Banco de la República realised what was going on, it finally set about acquiring them and preserving them in 1939.

Yet although these artefacts were known to be valuable, it was not clear then that they contained vital evidence of our past. Today we do know this. It is easy with hindsight to criticise our forefathers for their lack of foresight, but we should cast our minds back to the early years of the 20th century, when gold was still a synonym for jewel-treasure-wealth and the concepts of preservation and museum were non-existent, as only then can we begin to understand why it took until 1939 for the country to set about protecting the remains of its past.

It nevertheless took a long time for this work to take shape. The change of mentality was something totally intuitive. And although the first legislation aimed at protecting the country's heritage dates back to the 1920s, it is only comparatively recently that it has been possible to talk of really protecting Colombia's physical heritage, through things like campaigns in the media. The fields of anthropology and archaeology were noticeable for their total absence in the classroom. It was not until decades later, during the 1940s, when scientists Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Luis Duque Gómez and others who were fascinated by Colombia's indigenous cultures settled in the country, that a more professional approach began to come to the fore. Studies were carried out of the objects in the collection, and trips were made to the country's different archaeological regions. Then, a start was made on applying theories about how the collection should be classified, organised and made known. These theories were gradually adapted to the times and the needs of the public.

Because ultimately a museum is a place which preserves and studies the memory. A museum which from 2004, in the case of the first stage, and from 2008 as far as the whole project is concerned, will use the very latest technology to show how an object that is hundreds of years old can feel so 'present'.

The contemporary Gold Museum allows the visitor to sense the universe that surrounded the object, the man who made the object and gave it a functional use, who gave it a ritual value, who offered it up, and who returned it to the earth. A cycle which precisely portrays the life that grew up behind each object.

A sensory experience which creates a need to journey to other times, to feel, even if only for a moment, that you are part of an unknown, moving space, to attach yourself to that past skin of which so little now remains, in order to understand the alliances and links that existed between nature and our mythical ancestors.

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