PHOTO ALBUM: COLOMBIA; Leticia
Leticia has occupied a magical place in my imagination for two thirds of my life – hard as that may be to believe.
Colombia’s only port city on the Amazon River is neither famous nor glamourous. It’s hot, bright, and hectic. It has a population of 33,000 and occupies the northern third of a two-city complex with the twice-as-populous Tabatinga, Brazil.
Much of Leticia’s charm lies in its status as Colombia’s entryway to South America’s Upper Amazon River, a photographic destination I’ve imagined for a half century.
Cross a street, and you’re in another country. Cross the river, and you’re in yet another country.
I’m educated in political science and psychology and spent my life in journalism, but I’m an anthropologist at heart. And Leticia’s location in the heart of Ticuna Indian country had become its primary charm for me by the time we disembarked our plane in the city’s Alfredo Vásquez Cobo International Airport.
Awaiting my two daughters, two grandkids, and I just past Customs was our guide Ramiro Rios from Maguta Tours, who was raised in a Ticuna village and was highly recommended by the good folks at Tom Plan My Trip, who specialize in Colombian travel.
Ramiro and his adorable wife Marcella helped us taste small portions of Amazonian and Ticuna culture in Leticia, Tabatinga, and Santa Rosa during the two days we spent in the tri-border area.
The Ticuna are an indigenous community who occupy Upper Amazonian regions in Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. They survived six centuries of colonialist wars and pandemics to emerge today as one of Amazon Basin’s largest native communities, with an estimated population ranging from 49,000 to 80,000.
Colombia’s six thousand Ticunas live in the 740,000-acre Amacayacú National Park in the equatorial Amazon Trapeze. Named for its 1,156-square-mile-trapezoidal-shape, the Trapeze stretches one hundred miles north from the Amazon to Colombia’s Putumayo River, and thirty-five miles east from the Peruvian to the Brazilian borders.
We spent our entire time in the the Amacayacú Park in the Ticuna’s midst.
Magic does occur in Leticia, at the same moment in the same place literally every evening, when thousands of parakeets and other small tropical birds descend upon Parque Santender to roost after spending their days in the jungle.
The avian creatures make deafening sounds and fly dizzying patterns over the heads of locals and tourists as they swarm the city’s main park every evening between 5 and 6:30 p.m.
A bustling city filled with markets, shops, banks, street vendors, and traffic – especially ever-present motor scooters – Leticia proper sits well above the river.
But sidewalks leading outside the city traverse valleys where homes sit atop stilts that get progressively taller the further from the city center.
The Ticunas’ survival has indeed been the stuff of anthropological legend.
When the Europeans arrived in the early 17th century, for example, the Ticuna had been driven north from the river by the fearsome Omagua. When European colonization decimated their enemies, the Ticuna moved back to the river and found protection living among Jesuits, who had established villages interspersed among the murderous Brazilian bandeiras, who enslaved, tortured, kidnapped, and otherwise exploited the native peoples.
Today the Ticuna are among the most resilient native people and cultures on the planet.
But in the 21st century, the Ticuna face the same challenges as the rest of the world with climate change threatening their simpler way of life. Within 90 days of our departure in June 2024, drought had lowered the river by 30 feet. Ramiro reported daily smoke on the horizon from wildfires.
Two years after we left, the river is leaving Leticia behind, according to a Columbia One report Colombia’s Amazon River May Disappear, New Study Warns.
“Researchers warn that Leticia, which depends on the river, could be completely cut off from the Amazon by 2030,” the article says. “This is due to the waters of the Estrecho de Nazaret, where the river divides, increasingly flowing toward Peru and less toward Leticia.”
