A long time ago, high up in the mountains,
an ancient lake dried up, yielding the fertile soil and rich ecosystem of the montane Bogota savanna. Growing up in this cool wet climate, my brother and I bathed in tropical sunlight and torrential rains. We played in green fields, surrounded by the Andean hills, chasing butterflies and catching little frogs in the ponds.
We used small jars to trap the bumblebees that flew lazily amid the orange flowers.
It was scary. The bumblebees got mad. We feared they’d bite us or sting us and it would hurt like hell.
We’d collect them into Mother Jars: larger jars that were the bases where we kept our bumblebee colonies. The mouths of the mother jars were big, which made it tricky to transfer them. Sometimes they escaped.
Our game always ended when, having caught a dozen or so, one of us noticed that they weren’t doing so well: they just sat at the bottom of the Mother Jars, defeated. Sometimes they walked slowly in circles.
We never wanted to hurt them. We’d open the Mother Jars and release them—or, well, dump them, a black heap of tired bumblebees on the grass. We’d watch from afar as they recovered slowly and one by one flew away, unharmed—or so we hoped.
Dad planted nine palm trees around our house. “Alejandro, this is the tallest type of palm tree in the world,” he said. “In a hundred years, these palms will be very tall. You can tell your grandchildren that you planted them with me.”
The Andean condor—national symbol of about six different countries in South American, Colombia included—may be, along with the spectacled bear, the most stereotypical animal of the Andes. However, unless you count the logo of Colombia’s largest airline, I never saw any.
However, many birds still nested in the branches of the many types of plants that grew in the savanna. There were small hummingbirds with vivid colors. Small Andean sparrows (copetones) were everywhere.
They had brown, white, and orange feathers. I thought they were entirely unremarkable but now I think they were pretty.
Great thrushes (mirlas) in the garden woke us up with their melodious songs. They had pitch-black feathers and bright-orange legs and beaks.
Sometimes we saw white herons in the fields around our house. They were always distant, taking flight whenever we approached.
“They come from very far and only visit us temporarily,” said Mother. I always found them beautiful.
As the city grew, each year brought fewer herons.
Our biology teacher said that if you cut a rain worm in two, it grows again. I never tried it but I’ll admit that curiosity got the best of me and I did, however, once pour salt on a slug on a tree stump.
“It’s true,” I reported to my brother. “They burn! They disolve into a disgusting pool of slime.”
The slugs were small, though. The ones I’ve seen here, in Europe, are easily ten times bigger.
Having mentioned salt I must turn your attention to the Muiscas, the people who inhabited the savanna before us. The savanna has been kind to mankind for a very long time; one of the oldest remains of ancient settlements in America was found here, near Zipaquirá.
Our teachers told us that Muiscas were one of the most advanced civilizations in America, along with Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs. I don’t know if we believed it—it seemed a very distant fourth place.
The fertile, frequently flooding, soils of the savanna fed the Muiscas well. They lived in small villages spread all across the savanna and neighboring regions. Each village had a Cacique, the local chief, who paid tributes to the Zipa, ruler of the entire savanna, and beyond.
The Muiscas in the savanna were known as the “salt people”, because they mostly mined salt. They didn’t themselves mine gold, but their salt trade was so profitable, that they were swimming in gold; they became prodigious gold-workers. Today, Bogotans favor the exotic pink salt brought from the Himalayas.
The Muiscas spoke a language called Chibcha. They called the region “Bacatá”. Initially, the Spanish Kingdom established schools in native languages and provided Catholic instruction in Chibcha, but in 1770, the Spanish King officially banned Chibcha as part of a de-indigenization project, and the language dwindled. The ban remained in law for over two hundred years, until Colombia renewed its constitution. While many towns north of Bogotá, in Cundinamarca and Boyacá, preserved their original Chibcha names and Colombian slang incorporated many Chiba words, the language is long extinct.
The savanna has an endemic species of snakes, the savanna snakes (culebra sabanera). They are about thirty centimeters long. Luckily, we never really saw them—they live underground.
One time it rained hard for days and days, the soccer fields at school flooded, and the snakes came out! They were everywhere.
Some older kids managed to trap seven in a giant jar they stole from the school cafeteria. I have no idea how they did this. The added a bit of water and a few branches and leaves.
I peered safely through the glass and saw their little black scales with yellow spots and their little shinny eyes. The snakes shook frantically inside the jar, confused. They were super weird. I was fascinated.
I don't remember exactly how but, just before the end of the school day, I managed to convince the kids to let me keep the jar, along with its fantastic contents. I suppose the kids knew they couldn’t take the snakes home and I knew I had to.
I made sure the lid was sealed tight and barely managed to fit the jar inside my backpack. To do this, I had to leave everything else, all my books and pencils, at school. Who cares about homework? Not a kid who just acquired seven snakes!
The whole bus ride home I kept peeking in my backpack. The driver's assistant grew suspicious and when, eventually, my brother snitched, she figured she’d be better off pretending she never knew. It’s not like she was supposed to inspect children’s backpacks...
I got home and brought the jar to the garden. The snakes, inside the jar, looked sleepy. I freaked out, realizing they were dying.
I tried to punch some holes through the metal lid with a screwdriver, but all I managed was to scratch it. I was afraid of breaking the glass. I opened the lid and laid it on top of the mouth of the jar, leaving a small gap to let them catch a bit of fresh air. I rushed inside to look for some cloth I could fix to the jar and... completely forgot about the whole thing. Ah, the fleeting mind of a nine years old!
Right after he came home from work that night, my father came to my room. “What is Ana saying about some snakes?” he asked me.
Ana was the cleaning lady, who lived in our house, and who was absolutely certain that she didn't want anything to do with any snakes.
"Oh, shit, yeah!" I remembered. "The snakes!"
I rushed down to the garden, my father trailing behind. The jar was there all right, but the lid was resting on the ground besides it and... the snakes had vanished. I felt fascination and fear.
I started looking for them but dinner was served and my father grew impatient. I never found them.
I suspect that my Dad thought this was some strange type of joke; that I had invented the whole thing about the snakes, and persuaded or misled Ana, but I can’t say for sure.
We had many mosquitos. If you forgot to close the windows in the afternoon, at around five, you could also forget about getting any sleep that night. Those demons would fly into my room in the afternoon and wait patiently until all lights were off, and I was drifting into sleep, to come close with their annoying buzz. Many late nights, finally giving up, I’d turn on all the lights in my room and hunt those devils for what felt like hours. One night I counted seventeen kills.
Where there are mosquitos, there are often spiders.
Some were small harmless gray spiders. They were everywhere. If you laid on the grass to sunbathe, you could not avoid them.
But there were also some big scary ones! In the garden I found one that had a few bright red dots in its black body and long scrawny legs. I tried to catch it with a jar but she jumped so fast, that I freaked out and also jumped and threw away the jar. The jar broke against a rock and I decided I'd leave these spiders alone.
Well, a few years later one of these spiders decided to build her web outside my window, on the third floor of our house.
I didn’t like it. I wanted to get rid of her, but I couldn’t reach her web. I opened the nearest window and threw a few glasses of water. This mean spider, accustomed to the torrential rains that occasionally drenched the savanna, didn’t bulge. Had I been more entrepreneurial, I might have been able to reach her with a broom.
Instead, I gave her a name, Violeta. She became my pet.
She lived a long life —or at least long by the standards of spider lives— well fed by the never ending stream of mosquitos drawn by the light inside. In nights of teenage mysticism I looked out from the darkness of my room into the full moon and watched Violeta, in her web, in the foreground, keeping me company. I showed her to my friend and he said he thought she was cool.
Frogs also inhabited the savanna. You could find tadpoles in the ponds in their various stages of development. As they grew legs, they turned into bright-green frogs.
The savanna frogs were peaceful. Unlike bumblebees, snakes, or spiders, the frogs were harmless; unlike the birds, friendly.
To the Muiscas, frogs represented the human soul. Frogs are prevalent in Muisca art, often depicted abstractly, as rhombuses, which never really looked like frogs to me.
I found one jumping on the orange tiles outside the classroom and decided to keep her. I built her a little pen, with popsicle sticks, and gave her a piece of lettuce.
But the fleeting frogs died easily, leaving a dry mess behind, which was sad.
Water has always been precious in the savanna, and not just because of the little frogs. For the Muiscas, the most sacred place in Bacatá was a lagoon. I’ve researched this now that I live in Europe.
In 1535, near Quito, a Muisca, far away from home, likely travelling to exchange information with the Incas, further South, boasted to Europeans of the riches of his kingdom. The reports are somewhat conflicting, with some claiming that he was an ambassador and others that he had been captured. In any case, he told how, worshiping the goddess of the lagoon, his Lord, the Zipa, bathed in gold dust before diving into the cold waters, and those around him threw into the water all sorts of offerings (tunjos): gold artifacts, emeralds, and precious stones.
The most important relic of the indigenous people of Colombia is likely the Muisca Raft, a small representation of this ceremony discovered in a cave in 1969. Made in gold, it depicts a Cacique and ten other people on a raft, navigating the lagoon, bringing all the offerings for their gods.
This sparked the hunt for El Dorado. The Europeans’ thirst for the natives’ gold brought various independent expeditions —westwards from Venezuela, northwards from Quito, and southwards from Santa Marta— into the vast and impenetrable interior of the Andes.
The expedition from Santa Marta, nearing a thousand Spanish, followed the Magdalena river upstream and finally reached the savanna a few years later. Jaguars, caymans, snakes, tropical diseases, and the occasional poisoned arrow had reduced them to just over a hundred malnourished explorers when they finally reached the savanna. Records say even anteaters attacked the party, killing a horse.
But the hundred Europeans sufficed to conquer half a million peaceful Muiscas in the savanna, who didn’t much resist. They were also enough to bring diseases, which razed the savanna, killing roughly four of every five Muiscas. The Zipa was wounded in battle near the center of the savanna; he fled but soon succumbed, bleeding to death in the hills of Facatativá. His remains were only found about a year later, ravaged by the condors.
Bogotá (or, more precisely, Santa Fé de Bogotá) was founded in 1538, and the New Kingdom of Granada was established. More than ten million people now live in the savanna. Many of its rivers are now heavily polluted.
This sacred lagoon is called Guatavita. It lays on the southeastern part of the savanna, at over 3000 meters over the sea level, fairly close to the salt-mine cum Catholic church in Zipaquirá.
Several attempts were made, throughout the centuries, to drain it, to recover the golden artifacts. Even Von Humboldt visited, in 1801; he calculated that Guatavita could offer up as much as $300 million worth of gold. These attempts, however, never yielded much, leaving instead a long string of accidents and labourers’ deaths. In 1965 the Colombian government finally protected the area, making any future drainage attempts illegal.
In Bogota, summer is always two or three hours away; you just need to drive down from the mountains into the valleys.
Bogotans associate hot climate with holidays very strongly. This is very similar to the associations Europeans have with Summer. It’s very common, all year round, to just rent a summer house outside of Bogotá and go spend a long weekend reading, swimming in the pool with your friends, and avoiding getting eaten by the mosquitos.
My family used to own a coffee plantation. It was called “Badenia”. I only visited a few times, when I was very young, before they had to sell it for crumbs because the zone became very dangerous, due to the political situation with the guerillas. My mother never drank coffee, but she loved the scent of freshly ground coffee in the morning.
One of the few memories I have of Badenia was bathing in the creek that went through the plantation. As the sun was beginning to set, my father wanted us to leave.
I was young and stubborn and wanted to stay there playing. “Please, no, no, Daddy, I don’t want to go, can we please stay!”
As I played in the water, a wasp stung me on my knee. It hurt like hell and it made me cry.
My father said: “See? Why do you think I told you it was time to go?”
I wonder whether the reason I still remember this was the shock from the pain or the extraordinary confusion I felt, wondering how my father could have known that a wasp was bound to sting me, and why he had not warned me of this.
In Badenia we would often sit on the terrace at night, after dinner. My mother would read us stories as my brother and I looked at the fireflies (luciernagas) in the nearby trees.
Winter also comes to Bogota. There are the frosts from the El Niño phenomenon, where the temperature can drop to a few degrees below zero at night. The torrential storms sometimes bring heavy amounts of hail.
There are colder regions higher up in the mountains, but I never really visited them.
We also had plenty of moths, some as big as a small bird. You’d mostly see them at night, when you found them resting against a wall or tree, their wings wide open, displaying magical patterns with circles, a palette of dark grays, blues, and black. My mother told us that they brought good luck. I always thought they looked cool.
There were several different species of scarab beetles (cucarrones), of different sizes. The most common ones were slightly bigger than a garbanzo bean. They could fly, but not very gracefully, so they mostly stayed on the grass. When they flew near, you could hear their wings’ low buzz.
I often played with them. They were strong for their size; it was fun to trap one in your closed fist and feel it find its way through your fingers with its prickly legs. Their long gnarly legs had little claws that could almost scratch you.
You could always find a few cucarrones but, once or twice a year, for a week or two, they came out in swarms and the fields were teeming with them. You couldn't walk on the grass without stepping on them.
Some kids were terrified; cucarrones season was a nightmare for them. During the school break we would bring dozens of cucarrones from the soccer fields into the classroom and hide them in the lunch boxes or desk drawers of unsuspecting victims. Sometimes we’d wait for classes to start and release them at once.
A kid once tied a thread to the leg of a cucarrón. “I’m making a kite,” he said. It didn’t fly very far.
Another time he industriously tied short threads of different colors to the legs of two dozen cucarrones. They all started flying in the classroom, fleeing, little colorful threads buzzing in the air. “It’s Christmas,” he said.
I never heard of the snakes, spiders or bumblebees ever hurting anyone, but we still feared them. The cucarrones were completely different, though; like the frogs, we knew they were completely harmless.
Before they were cucarrones, though, these creatures lived different lives, underground, as grubs (chizas). The chizas were five or ten times bigger than the cucarrones they morphed into. If you digged, you’d find them. They were so disgusting that you never wanted to dig and, if you really had to, you’d better use a shovel. I regret that I must tell you that I've read that in some parts of Colombia people eat them. Ugh.
I’ve also read that the cucarrones have disappeared almost entirely from Bogotá. I read that the great thrushes, who feast on them (as well as on the frogs), have decimated them. My guess is that it’s probably just the city’s growth. The thrushes may be doing well, but so much for the silly cucarrones.
It's been about fifteen years since I left the savanna.
Last year I went back. I wanted to visit the fields but they are gone, conquered by buildings. The single-lane dirt road that thirty years ago led to our house has gradually morphed into a six lanes highway. They took away my father’s palm trees.
I wonder what the people who inhabit those buildings would say if I told them about the creatures we used to find there. The snakes and frogs, herons and spiders, moths and cucarrones, have given way to dogs and house cats.
Instead, I went to see a play in an old theater we used to visit. In the intermission I got a glass of canelazo and mixed with the crowd, looking for a familiar face—perhaps some friend from school, now with their own kids, perhaps someone from university. I saw many faces and recognized nobody.
For a special occasion a friend in Vienna took me to a fancy bar. Everybody wore sophisticated outfits. They brought me a cocktail garnished with a goldberry (uchuva).
Uchuva plants grew in our garden, in the savanna, like a bad weed. They grow very fast! The Colombian name, “uchuva”, comes from the language of Muiscas, who cultivated them. I never thought much of uchuvas, and when I did think of them, it was to wonder how anyone could eat this shitty fruit. I much preferred a banana, an apple, an orange… anything.
I hadn’t seen an uchuva in years. And here, in Vienna, a lone uchuva, still partially wrapped in its dry leaf, floated on my elaborate cocktail. I grabbed its stem and brought it eye level. It was exactly like I recalled them.
My Austrian friend registered my surprise. “Cool, right?” he said. “It’s an exotic fruit, from Indonesia, I think. I quite like it.”
It used to be rare to find them here, but now they’re everywhere.
I learned to speak German, including the word for cockroach. I learned to ski. Learning to ski isn’t easy when you’re twenty-five the first time you see snow. I'm making ends meet.
I ride my bike among the trees along a pretty river on the way to work and sometimes, especially in Spring, I see herons. I stop and watch them hunt the fish that swim upstream. They come from afar and only visit us temporarily.
This summer in Europe has been sweltering. Yesterday I had to open the window to sleep.
As the mist of sleep was embracing me, I felt something on my neck, under my chin. I thought it was nothing, like when you think something is touching you and you check but there really is nothing.
But then I felt it's gnarly legs almost scratching me.
I sat up, startled, grabbed it with my left hand, and instinctively threw it against a wall. I turned on the lights and searched a while but found nothing.
It must have been a beetle. But the bugs here are different, not the silly old brown cucarrones. They are grayish, and their wings are shaped weirdly... I think their legs are weaker. They’re probably just as harmless, but I don’t know, at least not deep down inside.
It took me a very long time to fall asleep.