Barranquilla, the largest city in the Colombian Caribbean. Built over concrete slabs that expand over mangroves, lagoons and watery ecosystems historically shaped by the Magdalena River and its encounter with the Caribbean Sea. 

Inequalities in Barranquilla and the mouth of the Magdalena River are shaped by, and permeated by water. In rural areas these are heightened by draughts and floods, and by the appropriation of water sources and waterfronts in the hands of few. Water in Ciénaga Mallorquín is a source of socio-ecological conflict. Water in Puerto Mocho has become a precious asset for a public beach. 

This chronicle will be a bit different – not led by a chronology of visits which included Tajamar Bocas de Ceniza, Puerto Mocho, Isla Salamanca, Ciénaga de Mallorquín, Barrio Las Flores, Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, Nueva Venecia, Tasajera y Barranquilla. But by memories, by opacities. Possibly, mostly by triggers manifested as opacities.  I do it this way as a means to try to come to terms – or to understand – the contradictory worlds that inhabit these waters that I will always call home.

A community of survivors that migrated from Bocas de Aracataca down in the same Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. It originated as a temporary community which today is more permanent than temporary, and with more than 310 homes. Surrounded by mangroves, which have given them protection, livelihoods, and also isolation, and that served as hiding places during the height of violence - just as the mangroves in Ilha de Maré in Bahia were places of refuge for enslaved peoples escaping plantations and fighting for freedom. 

Nueva Venecia, a congregation before known as El Morro. Landscape of cimarronaje (landscape of fugitive enslaved peoples / quilombolas). Inhabitants live in dialogue with the caprices and demands of the waters surrounding them, on structures built of mangrove or palmiche for pilons, and caracoli trees coming from Barranquilla for their home enclosures. Its people have faced a major massacre where paramilitaries assassinated 37 people not so long ago. Its people today dance to the sound of boomboxes that welcome us when we arrive, a picó soundsystem as loud as it can which harmonically joins the sound of joy of school children playing in the only sports field; children that struggle to move from classroom to classroom as the wooden planks over the palafitic beams are all rotten and mostly absent. 

It takes us two hours by boat from Tasajera, crossing the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta; that is how long it takes us to arrive. And to leave? I am not sure. In many ways I feel there’s a part of me that decided to stay.

Nueva Venecia testifies to its inverosimilitud, to all that is improbable yet there, and real.

Northern area of Barranquilla an area that embodies the perversity of housing speculation and green washing. Bordering the sea is today one of Barranquilla’s most ambitious projects: a 'new and clean beach.' But its ancestral landscape was changing fast. In our visit to Puerto Mocho we could see it still partially inhabited by fisher men and women who had to leave, and some had left. Not in the best of terms. Some facing forced displacement and dispossession. It was the second time for many: some families had been previously displaced during the height of violence in the 1980s and 1990s. These families held together, nurturing both Ciénagas and seas waters and beings. 'Ribereños' with generational water knowledges as environmental lawyer Maria Ester Correa later shared with us.

While I write this, six months after our visit, I see that the city has inaugurated the ‘new’ beach, and the ‘new’ tourist infrastructure that comes with it. Where are all of Puerto Mocho’s people today? Where are all the women, leaders, who so kindly cooked for us, and shared with us their life stories? What are they living from?

Rebuilding of a fisher community that brings the population of the Cienaga de Mallorquín together: Asoplaya. It lives today near Las Flores neighbourhood, a former palafitic village at the water edge, today consolidated and at risk of displacement due to housing speculation. Feared as a drug traffic enclave due to its closeness to the sea and to the port along the Magdalena River, reminding me of a similar accusation that Gamboa de Baixo faces in Bahía. 

The ongoing destruction of mangroves not only is a depletion of the area’s ancestral defining ecological characteristics, but the city’s dependence on mangrove ecosystems that can protect it from the rising ocean levels of climate change. And the displacement of the shore’s inhabitants, an attack on ancestral practices of fishing and livelihoods, and a threat to the collapse of the socio-ecological balance of the region defined by its inhabitant’s stewardship and livelihoods.

‘The one only beach in Barranquilla’ as the city’s government presents it today, derives its name from the legend of a decapitated man who arrived at its beach taken by the Magdalena river. Local fishermen argue that this is a political move to deem the place as dangerous and justify all ‘cleansing’ projects. However, Puerto Mocho’s name actually comes from a fishing technique – that due to the use of dynamite could injure the fishermen’s hands leaving them ‘mochos’ / crippled.  The so-called beach was hand made by the fishermen and women who arrived at this coast and left it again after being forcefully displaced; twice.

We are in Doña Maria's house, hostel and restaurant in Nueva Venecia. We have just arrived when we see a man, standing over a blue plastic container, tied with rope and wood wedges on top which try to provide a horizontal surface. It floats and he navigates. With a long stick he pushes himself along the multiple waterways drawn by palafitic houses in the southwest mangrove lagoon of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. We can hear a mapalé by Toto la momposina in the distance. A floating vessel; a survival mechanism rooted in fishing and aqueous knowledges.

Bogas: boatmen who controlled the transport on the Magdalena River, usually zambos (children from Indigenous and African) who fighting against the rivers caprices made the river a muse, offering rhythms, melodies and songs – in part genesis of what we today know as cumbia. ‘The mother of all rhythms:’ bambucos, merecumbé, bullerengue, chandé, paseo, puya, vallenato and porro. Relative of raw tambora coming from the palenques which is like; listening to the river’ as Wade Davis describes. 

We crossed the Ciénaga grande de Santa Marta in a fiberglass boat. Ahmed, our guide and host, is the captain of the boat that will take us to Nueva Venecia. He asks us to call him ‘capi’. We transverse a flat and beautifully exuberant landscape. We hear the birds, the wind, the motor of the boat. Listening to his stories I start to feel the uncanny silences of a dormant conflict. Surprisingly – or not - he is the protagonist of one of Wade Davis’ final chapters of Magdalena, River of Dreams. We don’t know him, but a similar silence defines his presence. Carlos, our photographer friend who knows Nueva Venecia well, shares some of his memories with him. He then turns around affirming we are in good and safe hands. The unsaid reminds me of the worst times when my grandfather from Santa Marta wanted to show me what he called the daughter of the mother of all mothers – the caribbean sea was the mother of all mothers, the ciénaga her daughter – but we couldn’t due to the ongoing violence that reigned these waters for decades. Today I am here, taking it all in, while fearing the arrival of my early childhood memories. We leave Tasajeras and wetlands expand in every direction. After an hour in the water, and crossing mangroves we stumble upon Buena Vista, then Nueva Venecia.

A husband sits in front of his wife in Nueva Venecia while she tries to share with us her personal story. A boat driver that evades questions when asked who rules the waters. The silence of locals when in Isla Salamanca we ask them about their livelihoods under the shadow of a settler. A community living on the water, but as polluted they do not have access to it, nor rights over it. Silence remains, and to some extent it feels silence still rules.

In Isla Salamanca its inhabitants grow coriander and other vegetables within a system of ridges that predate colonial times. We walk past, and get the most fragrant coriander I’ve smelled. The sun sets, the Magdalena river sparkles. We hear the birds, feel the heat. The only sounds we hear from our visit - our shoes, the ones who joined us, and the voice of the ‘capi’ - the ‘captain,’ the one who took us, crossed the river with us and in his words, ‘protects and gives lots of presents’ to the inhabitants of this national park. In the meanwhile he offers a tour experience to his own house, just some meters away, where we can borrow some of his paddle boards.

Aleta de Tiburón:

Monument in the newly developed Malecón infrastructure facing the Magadalena river, not far from the newly opened shining golden Shakira statue, and funded and built by Tecnoglass.

Shakira statue:

We visited the Shakira statue (monument?) various times, trying to grasp its phenomenon. There is shock and curiosity of people queuing to get in to see her, standing nearby, facing the river. We were curious too. Observing. We wonder what will happen with the golden polish after being washed over and over by the rusty and salty sea breeze that the river brings. We wonder, we observe; we listen.

Virgen de la Candelaria:

guardian of the Magdalena. Only highpoint in the 15km walk towards the end of the Boas de Ceniza Tajamar. Site of former airport. A reminder of Iemanjá in Brazil. A reminder of a deity of waters, a deity of fishermen.

Ruta Nacional 90, not usually talked about. Barranquilla is Bocas de Ceniza, and the Ciénaga grande, the great mother. The road from Barranquilla to Santa Marta, that one that led us to Tasajeras was built in 1955 eliminating a long loop around the cienaga but cutting the ebb and flow of water essential to the ciénaga. The highways still today serve as a dam, shutting off the sea, and affecting all creatures that used to live in these brackish waters. 64000 acres of mangroves died, and dead birds fell from the sky. It only got worse when sweet water coming from the Sierra Nevada was diverted to deliver water to the banana and oil palm plantations that on an industrial scale consume much of the Cienega’s life.

The music of the carnival is the music of the Magdalena river. As new sounds are reimagined and reinvented, older ones are honoured. The river has introduced new ones, but also has carried old ones north, outside of the geographical boundaries of Colombia. 

We sit around an table, covered with a fabric with the imprints of the waters of resistance of Ilha de Maré in Salvador, surrounded by fresh fruit. We listen to the community of artists that Jaider Orsini, curator, has brought together for us to listen to. ‘The origin of Barranquilla’s carnival comes from the river,’ says Carlos Amaya, theatre teacher, ‘and diversity sits in its celebratory heart.’ Whilst some argue that the Carnival tradition came from Spain, others recount how it came from Cartagena brought by enslaved peoples which after being reprimanded travelled up the coast to this ‘unregulated’ city - Barranquilla -  where it found its homeland. 

We learn about ‘the night of the river’: the night where the ‘bailes cantaos’ (sung dances) of the Magdalena River are celebrated, as the first night of the carnival. The ‘comparsa El rey del rio’ joins dancing. Caymans from el Plato Magdalena lead the way, preceded by a monumental cayman head, and followed by dancers embodying the river’s waters, and the flor de batatilla – a flower that floats in the river, and ending with the dancers embodying the bocachico monocuco – a big colourful mask and body long robe that hides one’s identity freeing the carnival spirit’s joy and dance; bocachico being also one of the typical fish of the region.   

All river communities - ‘ribereñas’ - are part of the carnival. A recognition of a river to which the city has historically given its back to. 

We are honoured to have ‘el descabezado’ the headless – Maestro Ismael Escorcia - with us that night. He tells us the history of his own costume. A costume that remembers those ‘non-functional’ men who float in the river. Revisiting his own history of seeing headless bodies being taken by the river in the height of the civil war and who were killed, as he says, because of the ideas they had in their heads. 

Olivia Gomez Severiche, cantaora from Iguana Palabra embodies the belief that the word’, and storytelling, amongst children, is the most powerful agent for change and hope. Cleansing the river is an act of storytelling – words can heal, words can cleanse.  She closes an evening of warm breeze and stories of hope and struggle by singing ‘bullerengue para llorar ‘of Graciela Salgado – bullerengue, and Afro-Colombian ancestral music tradition that as drum led repetitive mantra-like choruses invites to connect with one's own rhythm and voice, and become part of a collective chant.

Artist Breidy David Manes shares with us his practice of relational sediments with gyotakus imprints of fish – Róbalo y Jurel - caught by fishermen of the Bocas de Ceniza’s Groyne and Puerto Colombia’s pier, part of a culinary exploration exhibited at Casa de Meira.

We sit, we listen. We try to take in all the multiple histories and stories, the multiple songs and chants, and are grateful for an evening full of resistance, and celebration of life despite of. In solidarity, we share the waters from Ilha de Maré.

I wish I could go back, and walk along the Bocas de Ceniza’s groyne from Las Flores neighbourhood to its end with proper shoes, lulled by the sound of the agogó that Gaia brings with her, with the sound of the motorcycles who never arrive to drive us to the end, with the breeze in our faces as the sun hesitates to shine in its full strength. 

I wish I could go back, collect some crushed wood by the sea and on its shores. The fishermen looking after the mangrove clinic tell me it's the best nutrient for plants and new mangroves. 

I wish I could go back, and sit a bit longer at the end of the groyne, over the largest boulder of all, just observing the Caribbean sea and Magdalena river becoming one, whilst listening to the laughs, anecdotes of living on the edge of these waters, life stories and anecdotes told by our two fishermen friends who held our hands all the way so that we didn’t fall into the cracks and then taken by either the river or sea waters.

I wish I could go back, and sit a bit longer enjoying a cold red and sparkling Kola Román whilst listening to the sound of the knife peeling and cleaning the fish just caught in the sea - through kite fishing. 

I wish I could go back, and smell the fried fish that was being cooked for us in between jokes, laughter and singing of a group of fisherwomen and old good friends in Puerto Mocho.

I wish I could go back, and float in the waters of the Ciénaga Grande for a bit longer, attentively looking at all the animals that quietly immerse, in the clay, in the roots of the many mangroves species, and sing calls from its upper roots whilst the silhouette of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta slowly emerges from behind the clouds.

Returnings, by Meira del Mar

I want to go back to what once upon 
a time we all called our house, 
to go up the old staircase, 
to open the doors, the windows. 

I want to stay there for a while, a while 
listening to that same rain –  
I never knew for certain 
if it was water or music. 

I want to go out on the balconies 
where a girl leaned out 
to see the swallows arrive 
that came back in December. 

Maybe I can still find it 
my eyes fixed on that time, 
with a flame of distances 
burning on the small forehead. 

I want to cross the tepid patio 
of sun and roses and grasshoppers, 
to touch the whitewashed walls, 
the absent echo of the cages. 

Perhaps the doves are still 
flying around it, 
to show me the way 
fading in the shadows. 

I want to know if what I look for 
is in a dream or in my childhood. 
For I am lost and I must find myself, 
face and soul, in another place.

Meira Delmar, poet. Barranquilla 1922-2009

I dream of sitting again at the steps of Meira del Mar's, where we met the artist and curator Maria Isabel Rueda. Breathe the brackish winds in, sit with the smell of the manguera, and re-write this once again, and again, while looking into the house's backgarden.