Do you know which sea the water near your home reaches?
We made the Atlas to help you find it in our bioregion. It works like a puzzle: one by one, it gathers the local stories we want to tell, until it forms a great Atlas of our bioregions, in Colombia and beyond.
What you see enclosed by a black line is a bioregion. Here, the Northern Andes: the mountains above a thousand metres and the valleys between its three ranges. The dotted lines are national borders: here, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. The pencil circles are the stories we will tell next, and the blue dots are the ones we have already told.
Start with the great rivers. The Cauca runs between the Western and Central ranges, and the Magdalena between the Central and Eastern ranges. The two meet in the Mompox Depression and flow out to the Caribbean at Barranquilla. On the other side of the Eastern range, the Caquetá runs down towards the Amazon.
Now look at our stories. In Cali, the Meléndez River comes down from the Farallones to the Cauca. In Barichara, the Barichara stream drops into the Suárez, as does the Fonce River that flows past San Gil, and the Suárez goes on through the Sogamoso to the Magdalena. So the water from Cali and from Barichara, five hundred kilometres apart in a straight line, ends up in the same sea.
Florencia sits on the same Eastern range as Barichara, but on the other side. Its river, the Hacha, does not go to the Caribbean: it runs down through the Orteguaza and the Caquetá towards the Amazon. The mountain divides the water, part to the Caribbean and part to the Amazon, and it is still one bioregion.
At every dot there are people caring for their stretch of water: the forest guardians of the Meléndez in Cali, neighbours and a teacher in San Gil, a women’s collective in Florencia. They live far apart and do not know each other, yet they care for the same mountain and the water that comes down from it.
Which big river does the stream or river near your home flow into?
This text is part of the Bioregions Series, about the Northern Andes and the people who care for them. Watch it on YouTube or on Instagram, and explore the Atlas.
Voice: Cris Buri. Music: “Readers”, Ciaran Delany (Epidemic Sound). Map: Historias Regenerativas, with data from AWS Terrain Tiles, HydroSHEDS (WWF) and Natural Earth. Meléndez River footage: “Urban Forests of Cali”.
