At last, a proper walk in Colombia
I think I’ve just done the first proper walk I’ve ever done in 16 years of coming to Colombia. I’ve often looked at the world around us at Serrezuela – or at least before the high-rises came in – and wondered why I can’t walk in the mountains and forests. Too much insecurity I’m told for the most part. But there isn’t also a culture of walking, of enjoying nature, in the same way that we might have back home. My mother-in-law tells people incredulously – ‘they walked for two hours, can you believe it’ – when we get back from this outing.
In part this culture (or lack of) comes from need or from privilege, depending on your perspective. My family is privileged to have the clean and calm spaces of their community and the club – why go further? Others need the resources that the natural surroundings provide. Wood from the trees, sand and rock dug out from the mountainside, pickings from the giant rubbish dump we pass on the way to the nature reserve.
Fairy gardens and giants
Nature reserve is perhaps overdoing it. This is essentially the home and preserve of one man who has lovingly (literally – more in a moment) recreated a cloud forest on the side of the mountain, where once the land was farmed and bare. He calls it his garden, but this is nothing like an English or European garden, all formal and manicured. This is a garden that’s left to grow in all directions, a garden of ‘life-giving disorder’ in Fernando’s words. A garden of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species. Trees, including fruit trees whose names will mean little to a non-Colombian – papayuela, curuba, lulo and so on. Flowers whose colours appear all the more shocking because of their contrast with the otherwise green all around. Creatures that are definitely heard – the tennis rallies of birds calling from one side of the forest to the other – but largely unseen, aside from a pair of delicate hummingbirds, that flit and float above us.
There’s a freedom here – despite being with a guide and despite the density of the forest – that I’ve rarely encountered in Colombia before. I’m not constrained by fences and gates, and the chaos of traffic is replaced by the chaos of the growth around us. There’s something prehistoric about the place. Growth happens so quickly that the stone remains of the old hacienda have been almost completely swallowed by the trees. 40 years ago, when Fernando started out, the buildings these remains formed would have been the most dominant feature of the mountainside.
Life and growth happens everywhere here. Orchards sit twenty metres off the ground, on tree branches, having found a way to lay down roots there. It’s similar at ground level. Broken branches and rocks are home to miniature ferns and other plants, like fairy gardens in an otherwise land of giants.
Sowing water, and fear for the future
Amid the moist mist of the cloud forest and the ever-present sound of waters rushing down the mountainside, it’s hard to believe that 40 years ago, this land would have been essentially dry. That there would have been no trees and no plants growing, just patches of pasture for cattle. Fernando talks movingly of ‘sembrando agua’ – literally sowing water – step by step, drop by drop, to bring the mountain back to the life. Of creating ‘sitios amorosos’ – lovers’ spots – where drops of water could meet and multiply and slowly bring this garden back to life. We drink freshwater from a pool at the bottom of a small waterfall. It’s a giant stretch of the imagination to think that this hasn’t existed here forever.
But then we go back to that non-culture of walking and nature – despite Colombia’s biodiversity – and you realise how precarious this all is. Fernando is literally a one-man band – he lives alone on the reserve – protecting and growing his forest, but all around is different. Going through the gates into his property is like entering another world from the road lined with ancient lorries belching fumes, from those dug-out mountainsides and piles of rubbish, and from the basic wooden houses of families eeking out a living from their surroundings.
People take water from his property, perhaps out of desperation, but perhaps because they don’t care or understand about the life it brings to the reserve. As we walk, we hear hunting dogs on other parts of his property, perhaps looking for food, but mainly because their owners just want a trophy to bring home – there’s nothing good to eat in a sloth or armadillo. You wonder for Fernando’s safety, and with it, you wonder what would come of his world if he is no longer there to nurture it.
Back to reality
Our two and a half hours is over too quickly. As the gate to the reserve closes behind us, I can feel my mind closing itself off again. Alive in the forest, it can sense a return to the constraints of routine here, to the world of the club and the gated community we are lucky to enjoy. But now I know we can walk here, and there’s more to explore: back home, I’m straight onto Google to find where we might venture next.