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Purchase of land near the city in a breathtaking landscape forgotten by everyone due to the armed conflicts that surrounded it; seeing the land being converted into pasture for cows and knowing that there are more opportunities for the life that inhabits the mountain to re-emerge; I dream of building a house, of building it out of wood; Buy this land to let the grass grow so that what was once a forest can regenerate. Plant some native trees such as oaks, walnuts and canopy trees to help restore the land's memory and celebrate its biodiversity in the coming decades. The Yátaro project, covering 1.3 hectares in the municipality of Choachí, near the hectic city of Bogotá in Colombia, is just one of the many bets being made in the Colombian landscape that aim to give landowners the opportunity to achieve true To become guardians of the land's biodiversity.
After the pandemic, Francisco Yemail and María Fernanda Gómez decided to live in a more natural environment. But they soon realized that this was not enough to fulfill their dream of owning a house in the country. Unlike other urban generations who saw this opportunity as a way to own a vacation property, they understood that the bet brought with it new responsibilities. “We took over this land partly to restore it. These were pastures with dairy cows; We drive out the cows, build a house and ensure that the forest is preserved. We join other initiatives of small civil society reserves that are not waiting for someone to protect and reforest them for them, but have started using the land they have, no matter if it is just a few meters in size,” explains Francisco Yemail, who in two years has seen everything extraordinary that happens when you let the vegetation pulsate freely.
The architecture firm OPUS in another Colombian city, Medellín, has accompanied others in these adventures of returning to the countryside with residential projects that create new dialogues with nature and their surroundings. “We built a small eco-hotel in the municipality of El Retiro. It was a livestock area with only 18% of the native vegetation. When we completed the project, we found that 80% of the vegetation cover had been restored. Ironically, it is possible to create more diversity through responsible suburban development,” explains Carlos Betancur, one of the partners of the studio, which is committed to keeping nature at the heart of all its designs. “We have to enter into a new pedagogy with our clients. I am an owner, but I am also a guardian and I have a responsibility. What responsibility do I take to protect this land, just as society allows me to have an area for my enjoyment?”
In Yátaro, Francisco and María Fernanda have chosen a passive and active restoration. The passive is to simply let the forest reproduce. “Nature is very grateful, we left the property alone, we planted a garden, an edible forest with fruit trees and we did the rest by letting it regenerate itself.”
A parrot on a tree in the Yátaro Reserve. With kind approval
According to this experiment, 220 species of vascular plants growing on the land were found during a recent visit by biodiversity expert Mateo Hernández Schmidt. “Over time, almost 300 species can certainly be recorded. A surprising diversity of species for the relatively small area of the farm. All of these species together now have the opportunity to grow and intertwine into a coherent native forest that is well connected to the region's ecosystems and is home to a large number of plants and animals typical of the area,” explains the expert in his report.
The active restoration, in turn, includes the planting and maintenance of some endemic species of the site, such as alder and rosemary pine. A more complex task than it sounds, because the challenge is not to plant 5,000 trees, as was the original goal in Yátaro, but to ensure that the trees that come from a nursery survive.
“Letting the earth do its job, restoring native vegetation and, above all, seeing its beauty is fundamental because our challenge as a country is not so much to stop pollution but rather to stop deforestation .” At OPUS, when designing projects, we always think about how we start from native vegetation and how we get the client to choose it. “This aesthetic discourse has an ethics, there are ready-made models of beauty that we must change because the introduction of alien vegetation has an impact on ecological connectivity,” explains Carlos David Montoya, another partner of the architecture firm, who remembers the experiment to The Artist Roberto Burle Marx did this in Brazil: “This naturalist took the plants from the forests of his country to place them in urban contexts, giving a different value to the vegetation that was considered weeds and bushes, which was eliminated, and that now, after “Your attempts to reconfigure the taste are what is understood as tropical vegetation chosen by many for their homes.”
In Yátaro, forest management is already having a visible and demonstrable impact on diversity. Armadillos, cusumbos or coatis, weasels and crawling birds that are difficult to spot have already been recorded with small cameras that María Fernanda Gómez, a biologist and expert in working with cats, has placed along the paths she makes between the mountains find your country. and even a borugo, a mammal that was known to live in the region but had not been seen in years. “There are two fashionable themes in these restoration projects. The first is to sequester carbon through reforestation, a market where there is a lot of money. But behind it lies something that seems more important to us at Yátaro: concern for diversity. There is no point in storing carbon if there is no biodiversity. Without biodiversity, the planet as a system does not function,” concludes Yemail, who strives to continue to let life grow with his house rooted in the bushes.