About the Rivers of Color!
Every year in the remote wilderness of Colombia, an ordinary river erupts into a spectacular rainbow-colored waterway.
Located 170km south of Bogotá, three diverse ecosystems – the rocky Andes mountains, the sweeping Llanos plains and the lush Amazonian jungle – converge in the remote wilderness of central Colombia’s Sierra de La Macarena National Park.
It’s an area of striking biodiversity and beauty. If you follow the winding Guayabero River up a fork deep in the park’s southern fringes, you’ll find one of the world’s most spectacular natural wonders: Caño Cristales, a 100km-long series of crystal-clear waterfalls, rivers, and streams that explode in a rainbow of colors for several months each year.
Caño Cristales is often called “the river of seven colors” or the “liquid rainbow,” and Canos Cristalitos , known as “Crystal Channel” or “river of five colors, which is a smaller version of the Cano Cristales. According to local legend, the rivers escaped paradise to flow through the Earth. While both rivers kaleidoscopic colors may seem like the work of supernatural forces or Colombian magic realism, they’re actually the result of a unique biological phenomenon that generally occurs from late July to early November.
According to Javier Francisco Parra, local coordinator of Colombia’s Cormacarena environmental authority in the La Macarena area, a rare, endemic plant called macarenia clavigera lines Caño Cristales’ rocky riverbed. Park guides explain that for much of the year, this moss-like growth appears in a muted dark-green hue. But when the rainy season returns and the water level rises and just the right amount of sunlight reaches the river’s floor, the plant erupts in a vibrant spectrum of purples, fuchsias, pinks, yellows and greens that blanket the riverbed.
One of the wonders of this fragile and finicky ecosystem is that with each new season, the river appears different from the year before.
As autumn leaves on a tree, the macarenia clavigera’s growth and colors are determined by the year’s rainfall, temperature and sunlight. So, while one year, a stretch of the river may be carpeted in crimson, the next, it could appear bright green or yellow.
Caño Cristales travels atop the Guiana Shield, a 1.7-billion-year-old rock formation that stretches across much of north-eastern South America and is among the oldest geological formations on the planet. According to park guide Walther Ramos, geologists have come from around the world to study the park's mysteries.
Ramos says the Guiana Shield may have been formed by sediment from a series of ancient rivers, and today, it’s wildly rich in phosphorous, iron, quartz, and other minerals. This mineral-rich bedrock dips below the Earth’s surface. It re-emerges here in central Colombia to create the perfect (and only) place on Earth for the macarenia clavigera to live.
Remarkably, Caño Cristales’ stunning spectrum of colors remained unknown by most Colombians until quite recently. For much of the 20th Century, the government’s ongoing war with drug traffickers and the guerrilla army Farc made this isolated stretch of wilderness an incredibly dangerous place to visit – so dangerous, in fact, that from 1989 to 2009, the area was closed to the public. But in 1989, a daring Colombian journalist named Andrés Hurtado García hiked for several hours through the guerrilla-controlled jungle with a camera. After allegedly hiding from rebel forces in a peasant’s house, he reached the colorful waterway, snapped a photograph of it, and introduced the natural wonder to Colombia in the country’s El Tiempo newspaper – calling it “the most beautiful river in the world.”
After the Colombian military established a presence in the area in the mid-2000s, a trickle of brave tourists began arriving. But it wasn’t until the government’s landmark peace deal with rebels in 2016 that this trickle became a steady stream.
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Because of Caño Cristales’ remote location, getting here means journeying deep into the Colombian wilderness. Most visitors start from Villavicencio, a 430,000-person city at the crossroads of the Andes mountains and Llanos plains that’s known for its rugged cowboy culture. Despite only being 210km away from Caño Cristales as the crow flies, it’s a bumpy 26-hour drive through waterlogged roads. However, our transportation will be via a modern 50 seat airplane for an hour, a flight over an endless sea of green to Macerena.
For decades, La Macarena remained an isolated outcrop surrounded and controlled by FARC forces. But as Colombia’s civil war waged to a halt, the community has become increasingly connected to the outside world. And because Caño Cristales is only open during the day, each night most visitors retire to La Macarena. “We’ve broken the stigma of the region,” said Raul Moreno, a local school teacher who educates tourists on La Macarena’s culture. “[This] river used to be a [drug] highway. Conditions of living have improved around here.”
According to Moreno, in 2008, roughly 780 tourists—and only 16 foreigners—came to La Macarena. But Moreno said now the ranching community welcomed 16,500 visitors and 4,200 foreigners from 75 countries.
To help preserve the macarenia clavigera plant, park authorities now prohibit visitors from bringing in any chemical products that could contaminate the water, including sunscreen, insect spray, deodorant, skin cream and makeup. If you ask Moreno, these efforts are doing as much for the region’s perception as they are for the plant’s protection. “Colombia is full of nature that now you can visit,” he said. “Hopefully the world will begin to look at Colombia with different eyes.”