By Fernán Fortich, EL ESPECTADOR, April 27, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the big monoculture crops and the violence have transformed the original forests, campesino communities are leading ecological restoration processes. With community nurseries, other crops, and conservation agreements, they are trying to undo the environmental damage and ensure water supplies for millions in Magdalena, La Guajira, and Cesar departments.
Ángel Rey Rojas, a campesino from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, has been trying for several years to remedy the footprint that his father left on the landscape. While observing how the ridges and foothills of the Sierra fold together toward the horizon, he describes how his father, Roberto Rojas, came to the Sierra de San Pedro more than six decades ago to escape the violence in Rio Negro in Santander—more than 500 kilometers away—where they were stalking him because he was a Liberal.
His father was one of the “pioneer settlers” who came to the region in the ‘70’s seeking land, work, and refuge. He landed, fleeing the “conservative hawks” at the Palmichar ranch, which at that time belonged to a Catholic priest. “A priest with the surname Agudelo lived on the parcels of land there that he owned, and he could just point his finger at a portion of the forest and say, ‘That’s mine!’” recounts Ángel as he imitates the gesture with his hand while he’s standing on land that’s now a plot that’s growing coffee.
The ”El Diamante” farm, where Ángel works now spans more than 70 hectares in the rural part of San Pedro de la Sierra. He bought it with the money that his father, now more than 70 years old, earned as a day laborer in that area. The price in the ‘70’s was 800,000 pesos (roughly USD $190 at exchange rates in effect at that time). “My father bought it hoping to plant marijuana. To do that, he cut down more than 35 hectares of forest, using his own ax. That was something that everybody was doing, and it had a lot to do with the deforestation that took place then,” he says.
According to a report by the Netherlands consulting firm, Acacia Water, the well-known “marijuana bonanza”—a period between 1974 and 1985 when a large amount of dollars was invested in the illegal exportation of marijuana—meant chopping down an estimated 70% of the forests of the Sierra, around 150,000 hectares between 1975 and 1980.
With the decline of that “bonanza”, something else came to the town (vereda) of Palmichar, which is around the ranch belonging to the priest Agudelo; now it contains more than 150 families. It was coffee! That crop, supported by programs like Peace and Justice, also took over the region, because according to statistics from the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, more than 5,000 families living in the Sierra are dedicated to producing coffee right now.
These mountains that are blanketed now with coffee trees, which sometimes shudder in the Atlantic breezes, are one of the images of the changes in land use that the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, which contains more than 3,830 square kilometers, has experienced. The transformation of these ecosystems, which has also been accompanied by urbanization, cattle ranching, and other social and productive activities, not only threaten a key ecosystem in the country, but also water security for the entire region.
The Sierra is the principal source of water for the departments of Cesar, La Guajira, and Magdalena. More than 10,000 million cubic meters or water originate in its mountains every year; that’s 317 cubic meters per second. To put that in perspective, it’s estimated that one individual in Bogotá consumes around 10.76 cubic meters in a month.
All in all, no less than 700 hydrographic microbasins furnished water to millions of people living in the region. “The problem is that deforestation and other human-created pressures are keeping the basins from regulating themselves, and that’s why there’s less water available in the lower areas,” explains Dora Zapata, manager of Mosaico Caribe of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which has been working in the area for more than seven years. To put that in perspective, according to national government statistics, more than 123 hectares of forest were cut down in 2018, and more than 331 in 2020.
Cutting down forests, one of the best-known environmental problems, has caused soil erosion and the sedimentation of the rivers because the natural vegetation stores the precipitation and is key to assuring water quality, because these species filter and control acidity.
The lack of this tool is already creating water supply problems, particularly in the lower parts of the Sierra where water is mostly used for the cultivation of bananas and wax palms. The water supply difficulties have reached such a point that since 2015, in what’s known as Banana Country in the lower part of the Sierra, they are temporarily using what’s known as “peak and water” so that the producers can regulate their water use to avoid worsening water supply problems. On other occasions the problem is flooding and overflowing of rivers in a system that’s less and less stable.
Besides all that, the basins that come down from the Sierra Nevada also feed the Great Swamp of Santa Marta, the largest lacunar ecosystem in the country, and it’s being affected by the lack of connectivity of its water systems, and also by sedimentation. That ecosystem, to make things worse, has no integrated management plan in spite of its being a Ramsar site, an international treaty that protects the wetlands of the world.
That situation, which exists from the mountains to the beaches of the Sierra, is an early alert of what could happen in this region. Modeling by the Institute for Hydrology, Meteorology, and Environmental Studies (Ideam) and the Ministry of Environment, through its National Water Study (ENA), confirms a troubling tendency: while in the 2018 ENA the percentage of municipalities in the departments of Magdalena, Cesar, and La Guajira with risk of water shortages was more than 90%, in the most recent version of the study, showing all of the municipalities, 100% are in danger of water shortages, because of human pressure and climate change.
To try to remedy the situation, it’s estimated, according to a WWF study, it would be necessary to restore at least 12,000 hectares in different parts of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to prevent worse water shortage problems by 2030, meaning in five years. To do that, the local communities, the banana and palm growers, and international organizations, are promoting a project in which the producers restore the forests in different parts of the Sierra.
“It’s a situation where everybody knows that we have to take care of it, but not only is it extremely expensive to recover these ecosystems, but also, we can’t take away people’s means of subsistence. After all, they have to have something to live on,” commented Zapata of WWF, who leads the regional strategy for Protectors of the Water at WWF.
A fascinating and complicated Sierra
Nearly 400 million years ago, a star was shaped into what now is known as the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. In its formation of the Sierra, in the beginning of the Mesozoic Period, there were tropical glaciers, a “star of water”, which fed the dozens of basins like the Rio Frio, which owes its name to the temperature of the water that came from the melting of the “perpetual snow” at the heights of 4,000 meters. A demonstration of the watery connection that extends for several kilometers.
This connectivity has favored an enormous biodiversity that includes marshes, marine grasslands, coral reefs, and areas of dry topical forest, one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. That’s why the Sierra was catalogued as one of the “irreplaceable areas in the world” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (UICN in Spanish).
This unique assembly of ecosystems that can be seen from the ocean has made the Sierra an exceedingly attractive place. Nevertheless, paradoxically, what was happening in its interior remained unnoticed for years, not only by the world, but by many Colombians. The legendary German naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, for example, navigated all around the Sierra. He calculated the height of its snow-covered peaks by trigonometric calculations, but he never visited the Sierra. The mystery was such that, in 1873, the Colombian government offered a reward to the person who would be able to cross the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and describe it.
This historic isolation has made the Sierra Nevada into a scenario of armed actors who see the area as a strategic logistical corridor for drug trafficking. As explained in the book from Magdalena University, “Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Ecosystem: Reflections from Science and Technology,” the Sierra was the base for the first guerrilla fronts: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); Popular Liberation Army (EPL); and National Liberation Army (ELN). In later years paramilitary groups appeared in the region, and they survive today under the name of Conquerors of the Sierra Nevada, heirs of the organizations from the early 2000’s, and whose battles with the Clan del Golfo (Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) in 2024, generated the displacement of indigenous communities to La Guajira.
These armed groups control places like Guachaca, Minca, and San Pedro de la Sierra, which are under the so-called “law of the rifles”. In the case of San Pedro, which has 1,200 inhabitants and is built on the mountain ridge, there are military style regulations: there are night-time curfews, permits to enter certain places, and extortion of local production that is as organized as a tariff system.
“For example, when the communities take trips up to the glaciers, they charge a percentage of what they earned, as much as 400,000 pesos per person (roughly USD $94 at current exchange rates). For the coffee producers, they charge 200 pesos (roughly 5 cents at current exchange rates) for every kilogram of coffee, and there are farms that lose more than 300,000 kilograms, worth more than 60 million pesos (roughly USD $15,177 at current exchange rates),” explains a campesino from the area who asks that his name not be revealed. “At least they allow us to work; with other groups you’re not allowed to do much of anything.”
Hope in the restoration
Hundreds of families are living in this context in the foothills of the mountains, in houses that look as if they were built to match the mountain peaks. As you go into San Pedro de la Sierra, you see a written phrase of prayer, “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth”. That phrase illustrates the hope with which the inhabitants had arrived in the region.
In the midst of this complicated panorama, ever since 2021, WWF, the organization of cattle ranchers and producers, has joined a process of restoring more than 12,000 hectares—nearly half the size of the urban area of Bogotá—to try to revive the water cycles in the region. One of the starting points has been changing the relationships with the people in the area and changing the “chip”.
“When my papa arrived in this area, now some decades ago, the trees in the area were of such quality that they were being cut down to build houses, beds, chairs, and other things. Or simply to clear the land so we could plant crops,” recounts Janeth Canchano, a resident of the area.
At the end of the town’s main street, a community nursery that Canchano leads is preserving 22 species—like guamo (“ice cream bean” tree); pink laurel; onion cedar, and other plants—that are intended to rebuild the original mosaic of the area. These plantings form part of an effort to restore the hectares that urbanization, especially during the decade of the ‘90’s, left different parts of the Sierra without any ground cover.
One of the key plants is the well-known nacedero[1], which is a plant that is capable of capturing water from the air and condensing it in the soil. These characteristics could be useful in reviving the hydrous basins. These seedlings are transferred to the farms belonging to campesinos who have signed five-year conservation agreements. On those farms, part of the land is dedicated to active restoration projects—by planting—and passive, permitting nature to recover without any intervention.
“Besides all this, there have been technological investments and trainings, so that productive activities like growing coffee or mango are more efficient and require less area. The priority is to avoid expanding the borders of agricultural activity,” says Zapata of WWF.
In the case of Ángel Rojas, one of the campesinos involved in this strategy who has already planted more than 1,500 trees on his properties. “We have seen the way a lot of birds have come back, and it’s true, also the snakes,” he says, laughing. “We’ve also seen jaguars that have come back to live in some of the areas.”
Up to now, the project has only been able to restore 186 hectares, just in the areas right around San Pedro, the original town on the settlers’ side of the Sierra. This year they have already started processes for more than 40 hectares, where the process is a slow one. “We’re still lacking a lot of things, but we’re opening up a path so that more projects like the Minister of Environment’s Fund for Life can come in and finance more projects,” said Zapata.
The problems downriver
In one of the lower parts of the Sierra Nevada, more than five hours from San Pedro, you find the Banana Zone. “Why do they call it that? Because what we have around here is just purely bananas,” explains Celia Zapata, leader of the town of La Paulina, in the Municipality of Banana Zone.
Traveling around the area in a car, you see tracts of several hectares of banana monoculture that dominate the landscape. This is one of the productive legacies of the United Fruit Company which after it left was taken over by local business owners for a crop that dominates the economy and the way of life. As we have described in this newspaper, there are a number of companies that have been penalized for illegal water diversions that put the Great Marsh of Santa Marta at risk.
Some community nurseries have also appeared in the midst of these oceans of bananas. Their objective is to promote the transition to crops that are resilient in the face of climate change. “Decades ago, my papa bought a farm to plant bananas; that was the rule. The problem with that crop was that if you didn’t water it every day or so you would lose it and your investment with it,” says Celia Zapata.
Celia has led a process of recovering native species and also transitional crops like chili peppers, squash, and lemon to help small producers move to another kind of crop. “The hope right now is for a modified version of an oil palm that will take a few years to grow, while at the same time growing fruits that can be sold in the markets of Barranquilla and Santa Marta,” explains Richard Suárez, a campesino from the Banana Zone.
Add to that the voluntary seeding of river banks to stabilize the water cycles. “What’s changed is our relationship with the earth,” says Celia, while a salamander with a blue tail stops between her feet. “In the farms we’ve started to see armadillos, iguanas, and squirrels, which is a sign that the ecosystems are being conserved.”
These activities take place even though they’re in the midst of intensive crops like bananas in this area, but they’re activities that are trying to relieve the pressure on the Grand Marsh of Santa Marta. “Some parts of the marsh are getting sedimented and the levels can be low. That’s because, among other things, of changes in the use of the soil that are drying out parts of the wetland, like the cattle and raising crops,” explains Anny Zamora, the chief of Marine Policy at Invemar (Institute for Marine and Coastal Research). “We hope that in the next few years we can reach an agreement to improve the area management plan and assure ecosystem services and quality of life for the people.”
[1] Nacedero: a tree of the acanchaceae family (tricanthera gigantea