When people talk about bioregions, the mind goes to the páramo, the river and the mountain. It rarely goes to the city. But cities also drink from a mountain, are also crossed by rivers and are also part of the web of life of their territory. To see this, we went to Cali.
Six rivers coming down from the mountains
Cali sits in the valley of the Cauca River, at the foot of the Western Cordillera. Six rivers run down from those mountains and through the city before reaching the Cauca. One of them is the Meléndez, which rises at almost three thousand metres, in the Farallones, and crosses the south of the city.
In the Multicentro neighbourhood, the Meléndez runs along a stretch that was never channelled and keeps its natural course. That land was sugarcane for decades, then a lawn park with a river almost nobody looked at. Until some neighbours started looking.
A park that became a forest
They picked up rubbish, planted trees, built a compost site and made gardens for bees and butterflies. Little by little, the animals came back to the forest and the river. Today the Multicentro Urban Forest has 118 recorded bird species: herons, kingfishers, parrots, woodpeckers. Agoutis too.
Humberto Ortiz, a bird photographer and neighbour of the forest, explains it with a simple sum: the Meléndez is only about fifteen kilometres long up to the Farallones, and a bird covers that distance in half an hour. The river is a corridor. It brings the mountain into the city.
Shade in a hot city
In a hot city, trees give shade and release water through their leaves, as if they were sweating. Libardo Vázquez, one of the forest’s guardians, says this area can be up to five degrees cooler than the rest of the city. This year, during the drought, it was the neighbours themselves who went out to water the trees so they would not be lost.
Not a forest on its own
Multicentro is not alone. Cali has dozens of urban forests looked after by their neighbours, many of them joined in the Community Network of Urban Forests of Cali, which formed during the pandemic, when people started caring for their own piece of the city.
That is the most important idea in the episode. A lone tree surrounded by concrete barely survives. A lone park is an island. Caring for each thing separately helps, but it does not last. When we see the tree, the park, the river and the mountain as parts of the same whole, we no longer just take care of them: we regenerate.
Something to think about
Which green corner of your neighbourhood would you look after? Do you know which mountain the river in your city comes down from?
This episode is the start of a longer story about the urban forests of Cali, which we will tell in a documentary.
With Libardo Vázquez, Nelson Gómez, Paola Giraldo and Humberto Ortiz, guardians of the Multicentro Urban Forest. Song for Multicentro: Enrique Acosta. Bird footage in the episode: Humberto Ortiz. Image: Historias Regenerativas.
