Tenza and tourism

I'm back in the Tenza valley this week, helping my wife with her work. Yesterday we went for a hike in a natural reserve called El Secreto. It extends from 2200m altitude (notice the solitary, majestic wax palm in the photo above), a bit lower than Bogota, to 3500m, which is pure paramo. The paramo is an ecosystem unique to Colombia and four other Andean countries. It is a high, moist plain, dominated by frailejones, a type of hardy shrub. Most of the drinking water for Colombia originates in paramo ecosystems.

In our hike yesterday we didn't get all the way up to the paramo, but we did get to see a cross-section of the high Andean forest. This is a forest composed of a mix of tropical and temperate species. There are lots of plants from the Ericaceae family, related to blueberries, and we enjoyed eating the little tart berries as we walked along. There are also lots of unique orchid and anthurium species in the forest.














The area is home to the endangered Spectacled Bear, the only bear species native to South America, but of course we didn't see any of these magnificent creatures. Below is a photo of a cave that they released some baby bears near in a repopulation program.



It's really amazing how different the air feels in an intact forest than in the pastures that dominate the high plains of central Colombia. A forest feels much warmer and wetter, much more tropical, than a pasture at the same altitude, which in theory should have the same average temperature but feels much drier and either hotter (when it's sunny) or colder (when it's rainy or windy). The walk was really delightful, and I was amazed at my wife's sure feet and steady pace on the forest path, despite her being four months pregnant. She made the good point that we were at an altitude about 2000 feet lower than our hometown, so she felt full of oxygen and stamina.



We were scouting out this particular nature reserve as part of my wife's project to promote ecotourism in Tenza. There are a fair number of natural attractions in the Tenza valley, which is really amazing considering the abusive nature of most of the local economic activity. Since pre-Spanish times, the Tenza valley has been a major center for emerald mining. I would guess that something like 10 or 20% of the world's emeralds come from the town of Chivor in the Tenza valley. The area also has iron mining, gravel and sand quarrying from riverbeds, and is a corridor from Bogota to the oil-producing areas of Colombia's eastern plains. It turns out that the pristine wilderness we were walking through in the Secreto reserve sits on top of a rich coal deposit. To think that if the owners of the reserve weren't so environmentally conscious, that entire area could be converted to a dug-up wasteland!

Probably the major economic factor in the Tenza valley is the AESChivor dam, which has filled much of the long valley with an artificial lake that generates power for Bogota. This lake has changed local climate because it cools and moistens the air. The Tenza area used to be a major fruit producer, but since the building of the dam this activity is less viable.

The Tenza valley's mix of extractive and environmentally-destructive economic activities also leads to an odd social milieu. There is lots of wealth in Tenza, lots of flashy emerald miners and gangsters, but it is one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest states in Colombia. Roads are in horrid condition, except for the 16 tunnels between Guateque and Santa Maria, which are real engineering marvels. There are military and police checkpoints everywhere to counter both the armed groups that might damage or take over the dam and other resources of the area, and the cocaine that comes through the area from the eastern plains. Another odd trait of the Tenza area is that the US-owned dam company maintains a fenced-off camp for its employees in the town of Santa Maria.

When my wife started working with this ecotourism project, she wasn't that excited about it. She'd always worked with farmer groups, and somehow tourism seemed a bit frivolous to her. But in time she's come to enjoy and appreciate the importance of her work, and we've come to formulate a more or less unified economic philosophy involving both agriculture and local tourism.

Economists tend to divide an economy in three sectors: agriculture, industry, and services. I would add the wrinkle that agriculture and industry are the real bases of an economy, and the services flow from them. Even in many modern economies like the US, where services comprise most of the economy, we wouldn't be able to operate without the goods and raw materials that the first two sectors provide (even though in the US many of our industrial goods come from elsewhere).

I feel like many discussions of the economy are centered on large-scale, national and international flows of business. Especially in Latin America, many governments seem to be obsessed with exporting products and services to bring in foreign exchange. This has its place, but most of the economic activity in a country is by necessity local. Wherever you live, most of your money is earned and spent in the local businesses, the stores, the gyms, the buses, etc. This is a good thing, because it provides for a healthy local economy, with relatively well-distributed wealth. My wife and I believe in the importance of small-scale, locally-focused activities: agriculture for local consumption, small-scale artisan industries, services to meet local needs.

The difficulty for many local areas is to bring in outside money. Even if local activity is the lifeblood of any area, it's also necessary to have outside infusions of income. This is especially the case in relatively poor areas; if the only economic activity is poor people selling to poor people, obviously it's difficult to build prosperity. So what are the options for a locally-focused economy to bring in outside money? Agriculture can produce certain high-value, semi-processed, and/or luxury items like fruits, sweets, or meat to sell outside of the region or even for international export. Artisans (and fireworks-makers, in the case of the Tenza valley) can sell their products to larger cities and through fair-trade projects with other countries. And in services, we have sustainable tourism, which brings outsiders (and their money) to an area. Large-scale tourism can create some jobs, but it mainly concentrates money in the hands of a few large business owners. But a more small-scale, locally-focused tourism can give visitors an authentic knowledge of an area, and distribute tourist dollars among many small operators.

I think both my wife and I have really internalized this vision of tourism's role in bringing prosperity to local economies. She's happy working in her project, and I've revived my interest in leading tour groups through Colombia.

Last week I ran into two travelers from the US in a cafe in our hometown. I got to talking with them, and on the spot I proposed to give them a guided tour. We went to colonial Villa de Leyva, saw ancient dinosaur fossils and a prehistoric Stonehenge-like monument, and stayed at my father-in-law's farm. They really loved the trip, and I re-discovered my love for guiding visitors in Colombia. On this trip more than on others I've organized, I was really conscious of how tourism could be a vital force for local development. Aside from the money the visitors paid me for my services, in the day I was with them they spent over one hundred dollars in hotels, farms, restaurants, museums, and other activities. All of these were small, local businesses that wouldn't have received that business if those tourists and I hadn't met each other. So I'm enthusiastic about re-initiating small, local guided tours in addition to the larger tour groups I occasionally set up.