Maritime heritage and tourism in the Colombian Caribbean

Summary

The region where I live, the Colombian Caribbean, needs changes directed towards a more harmonious relationship between human settlements, the coastline and the sea in general.

What are currently the most significant changes in the relationships between the ocean, natural environments and societies in the territory you study? Which seem most consequential in the medium and long term?

The region where I live, the Colombian Caribbean, needs changes directed towards a more harmonious relationship between human settlements, the coastline and the sea in general. In the country's major Caribbean coastal cities, Cartagena, Barranquilla, Santa Marta and Riohacha, waste management processes for rubbish and wastewater clearly fall short of current requirements. This is problematic given the pressure generated by the region's touristification. Without going into detail, we can say that tourism provision has grown exponentially over the past decade without corresponding improvements to old wastewater and rubbish processing systems. Some studies conducted within the anthropology master's programme at the Universidad del Magdalena show how regional inequality is reproduced through unequal access to waste management technologies. Specifically, the poorest sectors have to live alongside waste, while the system focuses on solving sanitation problems in areas inhabited by people with greater purchasing power.

In conclusion, tourism pressure is a factor that must be analysed and mitigated. Another line of analysis concerns declining ocean biomass, which is affecting artisanal fishing. We could say that this decline is linked to global pressures such as climate change. The greatest problem is the lack of mechanisms to adapt to these new conditions while pressure on resources continues to grow. This needs qualification: responsibility for the failure to manage these pressures, particularly touristification and climate change, does not rest solely with local communities or governments. In the case of touristification, large hotel chains backed by major capital from the Global North push for concessions in the Colombian Caribbean, despite knowing the fragility of its ecosystems and the inadequacy of sanitation infrastructure.

How do these changes redistribute vulnerabilities, resources and land uses? Which groups, activities or ecosystems benefit, which become more exposed, and what trade-offs or conflicts result?

This relates to what I have just said. The limited infrastructure providing basic sanitation is concentrated in areas where major hotel chains or higher-income groups are located. This creates a particular situation. Under property development pressure, scarce sanitation provision moves away from the areas most in need. Economic growth, measured by the presence of more hotel chains and their supply networks, consequently leaves impoverished groups more vulnerable: without drinking water, electricity or decent living conditions.

It should be becoming clear that those who benefit most are the groups with greater purchasing power. Activities associated with touristification clearly benefit the most, at the expense of ecosystems that bear the burden of growing hotel infrastructure. To give just one example, the mangrove areas that shape coastal landscapes along the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are being sold as sites for enormous buildings. Once those developments are installed, life in the mangroves is affected by pollution, wastewater and reduced oxygen. This ecosystem damage affects food chains and therefore fish availability. The equation is simple: economic growth equals ecosystem deterioration.

Drawing on your fieldwork and research, which idea or experience that remains insufficiently heard should, in your view, contribute more to international debates and public action on the ocean, nature and societies?

There is no open debate about the deterioration of the coast in the name of economic growth. International debate should therefore address ecosystem damage and its direct relationship with the impoverishment of local coastal communities. This is not a call to end foreign investment from the Global North, but decision-makers need to review what could be done to ensure that investment in the Colombian Caribbean incorporates sustainability as a paradigm that becomes common sense, rather than as rhetoric. Let us take an example. A very famous international hotel chain destroyed a mangrove in Cartagena. It did so knowingly. The chain preferred to pay the fine rather than remove the hotel. Such unethical actions clearly need to be challenged, and so-called first-world countries should establish policies to control their companies' investment in peripheral areas such as Colombia.

How have maritime and port histories shaped the social and territorial relationships of the contemporary Colombian Caribbean?

The Colombian Caribbean has been an enclave area since the sixteenth century. In other words, its connection to the Atlantic circuit was established by configuring the region as a point of wealth extraction. In the sixteenth century it was pearls, in the eighteenth gold, in the twentieth the banana agroindustry, and from the final third of the twentieth century and throughout the twenty-first, drug trafficking. The maritime history of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta coastline, for example, has thus shaped an area that produces wealth enjoyed elsewhere. This calls for discussion of paradigm shifts: for example, how to establish more horizontal relationships within the Atlantic circuit so that local communities are not left with proletarianisation as their only prospect. It is an uncomfortable question, but one that must be faced.

What local knowledge about navigation, fishing, coasts or natural cycles is being transformed or displaced, and how could it be documented without fossilising it?

Artisanal fishing is clearly bearing the brunt of the ecosystem transformations we have witnessed so far this century. As coastal biomass declines, industrialising artisanal fishers is seen as the best solution. In practice, this means changing boats and travelling into deeper areas, with the risk of causing greater impacts on ecosystems that have not yet been incorporated into economic circuits. Likewise, the pressure on traditional fishers to increase their earnings leads traditional practices to be regarded as anachronistic. I do not think the issue is documenting these practices, many of which have been dealt a fatal blow. Instead, we should consider easing the pressure on traditional fishing, particularly the view that treats it as obsolete. This would mean, for example, major consumers of fishery resources regulating their consumption to follow artisanal fishing cycles. Another example may help. Over the past two decades, various markets promoted the consumption of grouper (Epinephelus marginatus), putting such pressure on these fish that they disappeared. Instead of promoting ever-increasing consumption of this species, seasonal consumption agreed among different actors could have been considered. That simply did not happen. I therefore believe the issue is not documenting practices that are disappearing, but discussing alternatives that reduce human pressure on ecosystems. In this sense, the mantra of "sustainable development" needs to be debated, because this paradigm has clearly not worked.

Who decides which elements of the maritime past deserve to become heritage, and which memories are left out of that selection?

In Colombia, it is clearly the state system and its expert groups that decide what is and is not heritage. For a decade, we have been pointing out how Indigenous navigation along the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta coast has been erased from major historical narratives. This tendency is reflected in the unequal distribution of state resources for maritime heritage research. While the Colombian state has invested enormous efforts in researching eighteenth-century wrecks, such as the famous San José shipwreck, there is no incentive for historical research into pre-Hispanic navigation. State centralism, which has been something of a pathology in Colombian historical research, tends to view historical phenomena as terrestrial events. The sea lies outside the analytical horizon, and the devotion to the San José wreck is the exception that proves the rule. Historical phenomena involving the sea are assumed to concern only eighteenth-century ships or their remains. Efforts have been made to change this, it must be said, but the prevailing image confines the Colombian Caribbean's maritime past to the eighteenth century onwards.

How do tourism, urban renewal and port infrastructure influence the conservation or appropriation of coastal heritage?

As I said earlier, property development pressure displaces local communities. This has a clear consequence: traditional knowledge is dismissed, so local heritage is simply forgotten or, at best, becomes folklore consumed as touristification expands.

In recent years, we have insisted that the boatbuilding tradition of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta coast should be studied and promoted, rather than regarded as unnecessary or useless. Efforts to recover these traditions have resulted from agreements between academics and communities, while the absence of state support has been constant. Some academics have even considered recovering these practices unnecessary or irrelevant. This is despite knowing that elsewhere in the Caribbean, such as the Lesser Antilles, various actors are working to document and disseminate local marine and coastal knowledge. We can safely say that there is a disconnect between touristification and conservation of local practices connected with the sea. We need to discuss how a balance could be found and how to intervene in the tendency to erase local knowledge.

What would decolonising research and maritime heritage management in Caribbean territories entail?

Looking at the recent past, we owe the idea of the Caribbean as a tourist region to the banana company. Tourists began arriving on United Fruit Company steamships, wanting local people to serve them in exchange for money. This layer of tourism led many sacred coastal sites to become leisure spaces. Near Santa Marta, for example, coastal sites used as cemeteries came to be regarded as idyllic beaches. Twentieth-century colonialism thus imposed meanings on sacred areas. How can maritime heritage be decolonised? It is a complex question. We would undoubtedly need to begin by questioning leisure tourism that views the Caribbean as a place of enjoyment through a modern logic. This would involve dialogue with local actors about how to change the colonialism that descended on the coast and configured it as a space of hedonistic consumption. We see the damage caused by this framing in cities such as Cartagena. Some steps towards reversing it would therefore involve deepening our understanding of the coast and sea through the perspectives, for example, of Indigenous communities that have inhabited these areas since time immemorial. Their worldviews have clearly changed, but that does not mean their maritime traditions have disappeared or that they have nothing to say about local coastal management. A process of decolonisation could therefore involve state and business sectors listening more carefully to what local communities have to say about the sea they inhabit.

Bibliographic information

Type

Article

Date

14 October 2026

Author

Wilhelm Londoño Díaz

Study Centre

ONS

Original language

English

Original document

PDF, 3 pages

Full text

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