voslot In Colombia, You Can Watch Whales, and Serenade Them, Too
Every July, tens of thousands of visitors descend on Colombia’s Pacific Coast, crowding the frenzied passenger docks in the seaport of Buenaventura as they wait for speedboats that will whisk them to the small communities lining remote Málaga Bay. They’ve come to see the humpback whales.
The whales, numbering in the thousands, are on their own mass mission: migrating from their feeding grounds near Chile to their breeding grounds near Colombia, where they remain until October.
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During the whale-watching season, which begins in mid-July, boats with licensed captains and guides take the visitors — mostly Colombians but a growing number of foreigners — to see the creatures breach, blow and slap the water with their fins and tails.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOn shore, visitors can also witness a lesser-known spectacle as residents of the area gather for an annual festival to celebrate the whales and revive a fading culture.
‘I was scared of them’On a late-June night, the sun dropped and a delicious cool spread over the beach in La Barra, a village of about 400 residents on the edge of Málaga Bay.
The festival, with an audience of mainly locals, was about to begin. Aside from the photographer and me, the only other attendees were members of a large contingent of volunteer physicians and veterinarians who had come to aid the town’s residents. Bandaged-up cats and dogs wandered all around.
Elders came one by one to a microphone to share stories about the whales.
Amable Rivas, a fisherman and nature guide, recalled how in the days before motorboats became commonplace, humpbacks played alongside the sailing vessels that ferried passengers to and from Buenaventura. People marked the seasons by the arrival and departure of the whales. They fashioned chairs out of giant whale vertebrae that washed up on the beach.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThen, in the 1990s, Mr. Rivas said, fishermen began to notice yachts full of people who had come from elsewhere to see the humpbacks. Before that, it had not occurred to him that whales could be an attraction. “I was scared of them,” he said, thanks to stories he’d heard about a whale “having swallowed a certain Jonas,” the prophet in the biblical tale. Now, he said, he saw the whales as “a gift.” Sometimes, when he was out on the water, he would hear them singing and sing back.
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Once the elders had spoken, a group of young women took turns reciting poems, including a ballad about a “fat fat fat fish.” A marimba band set up, and children performed whale-inspired folk dances boldly and expertly. Cups of viche, a sharp-edged homemade sugar cane liquor, began to make the rounds.
The Festival Mundial Ballenas y Cantaoras, a regional-government-supported event now in its seventh year, consists of two parts — this event in late June to welcome the whales, and one from Sept. 20 through 22 to send them off.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn September, the crowds would be bigger, with members of Wounaan (pronounced Woo-NAHN) Indigenous communities from the interior joining the Afro-Colombian residents of the beach towns, and musical acts from across the region would perform — not on the bare ground, as now, but on a stage that La Barra’s residents would soon begin building.
The festivities were already off to a good start. As the night wore on, the marimba and drumming got louder, and the viche flowed. As the residents of La Barra celebrated the whales, they were also celebrating themselves.
Map locates Buenaventura, Colombia, along with Málaga Bay, La Barra, Juanchaco and Joonin Jeb.
San Juan River
colombia
Jooin Jeb
La Barra
Ladrilleros
Juanchaco
Málaga Bay
Buenaventura
Pacific Ocean
PANAMA
100 MILES
Medellín
colombia
Detail area
Bogotá
Cali
10 miles
By The New York Times
Rediscovering the ‘fat fat fat fish’The area around Málaga Bay, part of a roughly 116,000-acre national marine park, is an important birthing site for humpbacks. Females and their calves seek shelter in the warm waters of the bay, away from fishing boats, shipping lanes and aggressive males.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA few years ago, a community organizer named Fabian Bueno, 42, began wondering what kind of meaning humpback whales traditionally had for the cultures who live near the bay. “Have you ever heard whale songs?” Mr. Bueno began asking people. “Did your grandparents tell you stories about whales?”
At first, Mr. Bueno said, it seemed as if there wasn’t much of a connection with the whales, and that local residents traditionally feared them. “But then we investigated a little more,” he said.
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Here’s more on our standards and practices.An Afro-Colombian cantaora, as locals call women who are guardians of oral traditions, taught Mr. Bueno the poem about a “fat fat fat fish.” The Wounaan had a word for whale, he learned, that meant “big dolphin.” Neither culture hunted the whales, whose annual arrival was associated with abundance, both of fish and staple crops.
That’s when Mr. Bueno came up with the idea of a festival focused on whales. “We wanted to help give people a forum for their traditions, their talents, and create a sense of identity and belonging,” he said.
A new kind of tourismImage
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhales are not the only attraction around Málaga Bay, which lies about midway along Colombia’s Pacific coastline. Visitors also come to kayak, surf and tour the vast network of mangrove canals just inland from the beaches. The ferries from Buenaventura land in a town called Juanchaco. From there, the villages of Ladrilleros and La Barra can be reached in an hour or so by foot, or faster by motorcycle taxi.
Lodgings in Ladrilleros range from bamboo cabins to small, comfortable resorts with pools. La Barra, where the whale festival is being held this year, has mostly mom-and-pop restaurants, surfboard rental shacks and wood-plank hostels like Casa Majagua, where private rooms start at 40,000 Colombian pesos, or about $10, a night.
The morning after the festival’s opening, while most of La Barra slept, I walked north on the wide gray-sand beach from Casa Majagua toward the mouth of the San Juan River, whose sprawling network of tributaries connects the beach communities to the interior. The tattered cloth sign of Hola-Ola, a place I’d heard described as La Barra’s best restaurant, blew in the wind.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe chief cook and proprietor, Odalia Rivas, known as Ola, was already at work. Whale season was a time of abundance for seafood, she said. That included the blue crabs in her signature dish: encocado de cangrejo. Ms. Rivas sautés the crabs in coconut milk, onion, tomato and herbs, wraps them in banana leaves, and serves them with a rock for smashing their shells. Several of her other best dishes star piangua, a black-fleshed mollusk harvested in the mangroves; it has a texture that is reminiscent of conch.
Many local women, including Ola’s daughter Sari Rentería, go out every day into the mangroves at low tide and harvest pianguas. “You feel united with the earth,” Ms. Rentería told me later that morning, with her long forearms buried in the mud.
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Ms. Rentería was designing a new experience for tourists, something to do when they weren’t watching whales, surfing or lying on the beach. Her uncle Mr. Rivas, the fisherman who had spoken the night before, already offered boat tours to discover the area’s many hidden waterfalls and natural pools. Ms. Rentería brings visitors out to dig for pianguas that they can cook together.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSantiago Ortiz, an elected official from La Barra, had accompanied us into the mangroves. Mr. Ortiz, like Mr. Bueno, was big on oralidad, or oral traditions. It’s in situations like this, he said — women out harvesting pianguas, for example — that such traditions are sustained. “It’s not your grandfather sitting down with you and telling you a story,” he explained. “It’s your grandfather telling you a story while you’re doing something like fishing.”
Mr. Ortiz is an unlikely politician: a 19-year-old biology student in the city of Cali who can get to La Barra only on weekends and holidays. He hopes to promote a limited form of tourism in the town, one stressing nature and culture. Hosting the whale festival helped. “I think this is the right moment,” he said, “to present ourselves to the world.”
‘The spirit of the whale’Part of Mr. Bueno’s vision for the whale festival was to create a shared cultural space for Afro-Colombians and Wounaan, who came together mainly through trade. When I asked Ms. Rivas, the chef, about what recipes were common among the Wounaan, she had no idea. “We live pretty separate,” she explained.
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Though no Wounaan had come to the festival’s opening night, some planned to present songs, crafts and stories in September. For that reason, residents of one Wounaan community called Jooin Jeb (HO-een HEB), had invited Mr. Bueno’s team to their home, on a tributary of the San Juan River.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn the early morning, amid an incessant light rain, the photographer and I set off with Mr. Bueno and his festival delegation from Ladrilleros on boats piloted by Wounaan captains through the thickest, oldest mangroves I had ever seen, toward Jooin Jeb. After two hours, the dark webs of mangroves gave way to the sight of lacy açai palms. A toucan flew low across the river. We docked at earthen stairs carved into the steep riverbank.
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Jooin Jeb’s 130-some residents all speak the Wounaan language, Woun Meu, along with Spanish. Many Wounaan women are master weavers, using fine palm fibers and natural dyes to create elegant, shiny, stiff-walled baskets. Today was an important holiday for the community, a harvest festival, and many of the young adults who work or study elsewhere had returned. Everyone, from babies to elders, wore freshly painted skin designs of blue-black ink made from jagua fruit.
Otoniel Chamarra, 39, had his upper body painted in a double zigzag pattern whose four lines crossed at the heart. The design was meant to represent roads, he said, because he was contemplating which road to take with his studies and his life. Mr. Chamarra was working on a degree in business administration in Cali, and also served as Jooin Jeb’s cultural director. In September, he would speak in La Barra about Wounaan perspectives on ecology and, of course, whales.
For most of their history the Wounaan had been mariners, inhabiting beaches like La Barra’s, Mr. Chamarra said. Though in recent centuries they lived deeper inland, “we have always been in both the river and in the sea,” he said. “The whale protects those lost at sea, and it transmits the energy that has everything to do with our harvest.”
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It is in the month of June, when the humpbacks are on their way to Málaga Bay, Mr. Chamarra said, that the Wounaan prepare for this feast, gathering all the families for a prosperous year ahead. “The spirit of the whale,” he said, “is the soul of the products we harvest.”
After sharing with our hosts a generous lunch of steamed river fish and fresh açai juice, we said farewell to Jooin Jeb. Iridescent blue butterflies floated all around our boats on our journey through forest and mangroves. The great river widened as we approached the sea, drawn, like so many others, toward the whales.
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