If you want exotic, if you want indigenous cultures, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta has them in spades. I am not talking Indian Casinos and Museaums, I am talking time capsuls, people truly living with the methods of another time, pre enlightenment, with on occasional cell phone thrown in, but it just accents how resilient thier culture has been when it coems flying out of a heavy cloak pocket made of yucca sinew and they start speaking in what sounds like chicken clucks to you. They might keep you from getting to the mountain the way you like, but they sure as heck will intrigue you for a bit, might even charm you as has happened to me with the Arawaku’s and some of the higher elevation Koguis, who are the nuttiest of the bunch as I can tell. I have seen mountainous indigenous people in the Himalayas, and they are charming indeed, and I know them to exists in this form, in their traditional lifestyle, in other parts of the Andes, most notably Bolivia, now Ecuador as I travel, and Peru, and in the Amazon and parts of the frontier region between Venezuela, the Guyanas and Surinam and Brazil, but this is a pretty unadulterated bunch for only 2 and a half hours flight from Miami. I’ll finish the survey by saying that parts of Timor, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea still have indigenous tribes living unadulterated (except for an odd cell phone as usual), as well as areas in Southern Africa, like Namibia and Botswana, and some Eskimo groups up north, but with each passing year the numbers do decline, and about half the languages in the world, 3000 of 6000 are in danger of extinction in the next generation. That is not a fear here, with only one of the four languages of the Sierra Nevada tongues gone, and the other 3 doing quite well.
The tribes in the Sierra come from the Pre-Colombian tribes of the region obviously, and there was a high culture called the Tayrona that seemed to decline sometime in the 1400’s, before Columbus from what I can tell. Their capitol city, now called Ciudad Perdida, Spanish for Lost City, rediscovered in the 1970’s, was over by Minca, above Santa Marta, and as I have mentioned in relationship to security, is now a popular 3-4 day 40 km tourist trek, one I kind of wish I had done, as I poked around the rougher edges of th sierra without a fun kind of hit on the German chick excursion. The tribes in the Sierra either descended from them, or moved into the sierra to escape the movement of the Spanish into the Valleys from their original foot holds on the coast from the beginning of the 1500’s. The Spanish came looking for gold, but eventually moved into agriculture in Colombia as they did all over Latin America. They sent explorations into the interiors, the famed Conquistadors, starting in the 1520’s or so and 1530’s, and started creating towns soon after, although there was a large population of Indigenous already there obviously. The unfortunate fact over all of the Americas is that their numbers were cut usually by 90% by the diseases brought by the Westerners, so that the population densities are higher than assumed by the original writers, perhaps in line with the Sierra today. Valledupar was named after the local chieftain whose settlement might have been there, the same with Mompox. There were other dominant or high cultures in the Magdalena river valley near Mompox, where they undertook to build ditches, dykes for farming, and platforms for living to deal with the inevitable flooding of the cienegas (in this case fresh water swamps and lagoons, although the word can mean salt water ones as well, as with the ones between Santa Marta and Barranquilla) in these areas, and another famous or two tribe south of or near Bogota and one in San Antonio from whence the gold came, often from grave robbing, but these cultures had stone carving and evident contact with the Incas.
Alright,..to the present day.
First a bit of anthropology I guess. The Upper Limit of the Habitation of the Sierra tends to be about 7500 ft, about 2500 meters, because this is the upper extent of Plantain growth in the Sierra, their main staple, according to something I read. This jibes with what I saw. The valleys also seemed to be open well below an alleged tree line of 11,000 ft in spots, down to like 6000 ft above Guatapuri, and I chalk this up to perhaps grazing, lack of sunlight in spots due to the steepness and the east west running ridges, or just me not having the eyes to distinguish trees from where I stood.
These are the 4 tribes of the Sierra
Kogui
Arawaku
Wiwas
Kancuamos
there is a kind of fifth tribe, the Hippie Koguis, made up of Urban Refugees from both Colombia and outside. They are also referred to as the ‘Civilizados’, the civilized ones. I probed if this was considered an inapropriate term by the natives, but some Arawakus made it plain they didn’t give a crap. the Arawakus have a lot of pride!They seem to ahve come in the 70’s, kind of Vermont for the Guerilla resistant, and live amongst the natives in little farms kind of doing their own thing. Some of them serve as Paramedics for the tribes in a program they call Medicos. They number below 100 I was told. I met perhaps 5, in a kind of magical surreal run in with civilization worthy of a scene from Apocolypse Now, and heard of another, an America, who built a piece of Paradise above Guatapuri, but hustled out ahead of the FARC, his house now in ruins but with a row of trees still marking how to get there.
nearby, the Wayuu’s of La Guajira and
Embrerra of The Darian Region and Choco
The Crazy tribe that likes to drink across the valley whose name now escapes me, but they live along the Venezuelan border and are known for being pretty feral drunks.. everyone describes them the way Europeans might descibe the Irish, with a kind of wistful respect.
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