Parque Cretácico (Dinosaur Park!!!)
No visit to Sucre is complete without a visit to the Parque Cretácico… a dinosaur park on the edge of town in a cement factory… however, before you get worried that PB and I have gone nuts I will tell you now that this is not a kids’ dinosaur park BUT an awesome park with REAL dinosaur footprints… in fact the dinosaur park in Sucre is apparently among the places with the most dinosaur footprints in the WORLD…now how cool is that?!?
Our day trip to the park started with a ride on the Dinobus 🙂 🙂 Unfortunately it wasn’t a bus in the shape of a dinosaur – now that would have been cool – but rather a double decker bus with a picture of a dinosaur on the side… Though, I have to say that securing a seat on the open-air top-deck meant we enjoyed the ride nonetheless 🙂 🙂
Once we got off the Dinobus we headed to the entrance – with a few stops for photos on the way… yes it was only about 100m to the entrance, but sometimes it can be hard to resist taking pictures… especially when they’re of a cement factory!?!… or is that just us!?!
Our visit to the park started with a guided tour (in English 🙂 )… there was heaps of information about all the different types of dinosaurs, and big life-size models of the dinosaurs too 🙂
But what I found the most fascinating was learning about the site itself and how the dinosaur footprints had been discovered by accident in the side of the cement cliff… in fact if it hadn’t been for an eathquake in Sucre in the 1940’s the cement factory might never have been built (it was apparently created to help with the reconstruction effort…) and if it hadn’t been built, these awesome footprints probably wouldn’t have been unearthed…
The footprints are located on a cliff face …
Apparently dinosaurs didn’t climb up big cliff faces back in the day though… but rather the area was actually a big flat area on the earth… in fact a big lake, full of clay-soil… the footrints were left and then the lake dried up and layers of sediment covered the footprints… changes in plate movement then pushed the earth up, meaning that what was a flat lake area became a cliff… pretty impressive if you ask me…
After our general ‘English language tour’ of the park where we learnt lots of generic information about dinosaurs we got to join a second tour… this one took us down to the cliff face so we could get up close with the dinosaur footprints 🙂 🙂
The walk down to the bottom of the cliff was pretty relaxed – everyone was looking forward to getting up close to the REAL GENUINE dinosaur footprints…
And at the bottom the footprints were IMPRESSIVE…
And as if seeing GENUINE, REAL dinosaur tracks wasn’t enough of a highlight for the day… it didn’t end there… I reckon the dinosaur park had some of the best vantage points for views over Sucre that we’d seen so far (and we’d seen quite a few after nearly 2 weeks in Sucre 😉 )
I can only reiterate that no trip to Sucre would be complete without a trip to the Parque Cretácico 🙂