Ecovillage in Vichada, Colombia
Centro Las Gaviotas is an ecovillage located in the Llanos region of Colombia, in the department of Vichada. It was founded in 1971 by Paolo Lugari, who assembled a group of engineers and scientists in an attempt to create alternative and sustainable modes of living that were specifically adapted to the tropics in developing nations. Gaviotas has developed many internationally recognized technologies such as windmills and water pumps specifically designed to be low cost and adapted to tropical environments, it has also planted around 10,000 hectares of forest that have allowed hundreds of native plant and animal species to thrive in a harsh environment from where forests have long receded.
Their terraformation of the llanos allows Las Gaviotas to thrive, but it is not an example of low impact ecology practised by many eco-villages. Las Gaviotas is largely apolitical, a strategy which has allowed it to grow amidst the cocaine growers, paramilitary organizations, insurgent guerrilla groups, and military troops present in the Llanos. The village is further separated from many eco-anarchist movements because of its early ties to the United Nations and the Colombian government.
History.
Early days and support from the United Nations.
Paolo Lugari first saw the Colombian Llanos in 1966 when his uncle, Tomás Castrillón, who was the minister of Public Works at the time, took him on an inspection flight to the Llanos. Paolo was captivated by the seemingly empty landscape and soon after travelled to Vichada by car with his brother. After days of travel they found a couple of deserted buildings from the abandoned construction of a highway through the Llanos. Lugari chose this place to start a community, he staked 10,000 hectares around the abandoned buildings and started a non-profit called El Centro las Gaviotas. The day the brothers arrived they saw river gulls (gaviotas in Spanish) and chose this as the name for the project.
Lugari envisioned Gaviotas as a laboratory for a tropical civilization. Lugari theorized that in order to accommodate Colombia's growing population, people would either have to settle the Amazon or Chocó regions, destroying some of the richest rainforest in the planet as was already happening in the Andean regions of Colombia. So Lugari wanted to see if the Llanos could be made inhabitable while rejecting reliance on technology and knowledge from distant, temperate places like the United States and Europe. The Llanos were very sparsely populated apart from Guahibo peoples and refugees from La Violencia, which for Lugari made the region ideal testing ground for a new tropical way of living.
Lugari started bringing academics and engineers to Gaviotas such as Sven Zethelius to get involved with the project. In 1970, Sven Zethelius, the son of a Swedish immigrant to Colombia, told Lugari about the greenhouse gas effect and the rapid loss of biodiversity across the entire planet. He encouraged Lugari to create an alternative way of living, a bio-system, in harmony with nature if he was serious about settling the Llanos. Gaviotas started bringing many university students to experiment and design new technologies that could be used in the harsh environment of the Llanos. Different water pumps, soil cement, windmills or any kind of device that could help people and be adapted to local conditions were encouraged. Most students came from Universidad de Los Andes and Universidad Nacional, and many Peace Corps volunteers form the US also spent time in Gaviotas in the early days, but gradually left.
In the first years, the population of Gaviotas was of 20 people, many Guahibo people helped build houses and hammocks. The Guahibo asked for a school, and Lugari was able to build the school and also bring nurses regularly to Gaviotas. Given the oil embargo of 1973, Gaviotas gained notoriety for their methodologies focused on the use of renewable energy. Many journalists came to visit the community as well as a delegation from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The UNDP declared Gaviotas a model community and started providing funding, which helped Gaviotas continue to develop technology and employ people. By the late 1970s, Gaviotas had grown to around 200 people, and a visit from the UNDP in 1979 secured a new round of funding after the delegates saw the impressive water pump and windmill technology Gaviotas had developed.
However, also in the late 1970s, Colombia's internal conflict was intensifying and insurgent groups started taking over the Llanos in and around Gaviotas. Insurgent groups set up roadblocks and charged protection money to locals. On several occasions, Gaviotas was papered with FARC leaflets and FARC insurgents forced Gaviotans to gather for indoctrination. The community chose to remain neutral and banned weapons from Gaviotas. It became generally known that Gaviotas was neutral and their staff were generally respected as they travelled across the region. Both the military and insurgent armed groups used Gaviotas for operations, usually without community consent, and Gaviotas' all-solar hospital was used by both wounded military and insurgent soldiers, sometimes being treated side by side.
A new hospital was built in the mid 1980s that needed no air conditioning and fully ran on solar energy. Not photovoltaic solar energy since the technology was prohibitively expensive at the time, but different forms of solar technology like convection solar heaters to sterilize water. The local Guahibo had been important partners in developing Gaviotas and used the old hospital regularly, but they considered being locked indoors away from family to be the opposite of healing, so a separate wing was added to the hospital. Local Guahibos designed and built themselves a Gahibo maloca where patients could sleep in hammocks and have their relatives stay with them.
Loss of funding and pine plantations.
In the late 1980s Gaviotas suffered significant financial blows. UNDP stopped funding and the Colombian Central Mortgage Bank stopped investing in social housing, meaning that Gaviotas got no more large contracts to install their solar water heating technology, so they started only selling piecemeal contracts to affluent individuals. However, out of this crisis came the solution that has become the symbol of Gaviotas, its Caribbean pine plantations. Hundreds of crops had been tested at Gaviotas, with virtually all failing due to the thin, acidic soil of the Llanos. Only in the gallery forests is the soil good enough to grow crops. At a conference in Caracas, an agronomist suggested to Lugari to test pine seedlings from Honduras. The first Caribbean pines were planted from seeds brought from la Mosquitia by Lugari. The first trees were planted in 1983, when they were 8 years old, incisions were made on the bark to see if resin could be collected, every 12 days a new incision was made higher up the tree according to the instructions of a Venezuelan pine plantation. After 36 days the yield of pine resin was equivalent to what should be produced by 25-year-old trees according to manuals. Through this pine resin, Gaviotas found a way to be financially independent, since the resin is used in the manufacturing of paints, varnishes, and other products, and Colombian companies had been importing resin for decades. Gaviotas was able to serve this market and also found other commercial applications for the resin. Furthermore, the pine trees produce sap that the people collect, process, and sell as colophony, turpentine, and rosin for stringed instruments' bows.
In 1982, Sven Zethelius had theorized that the pine trees would require help from mycorrhiza to properly digest the Llanos soil, which was later confirmed during their visit to a Venezuelan plantation. A Venezuelan company donated 3 kilos of Pizolithus tinctorius, which does not occur naturally in the Llanos. Soon they realized that only one application of the fungus was enough, unlike the Venezuelan plantations which had to reapply fungus continually. The Gaviotas pines were also growing surprisingly fast. It was theorized in the community that since Gaviotas did not use herbicides as is common practice in plantations, the mycorrhiza was thriving and needed no further help. Also, since no herbicides were being used, an entire understory of vines, shrubs and trees started to grow under the pines, which commercial forestry plantations advice against to avoid competition, but given that the pines were growing so healthily, Gaviotans sensed that the diversity of plants was helping the soil improve and benefitted the pine trees.
In light of the V Centenary celebrations organized by Spain, Lugari made a proposal to the Spanish government to help afforest and reforest millions of hectares in South America, but the Spanish government refused. The Japanese government, however, did provide funding that allowed Gaviotas to plant a further 2,000 hectares with Caribbean pines. Another 1,500 were planted around the same time with a forestry grant from the Colombian government.
As Gaviotas planted pines, a whole new forest grew where only grasses could survive earlier. This led to an explosion of fauna and flora in the plantations. It is unclear if there were dormant seeds in the ground or if birds and other animals drop seeds that make the basis of the new forest, but in the end Gaviotas was able to simultaneously find an economic activity to support itself and provide a platform for biodiversity to thrive. The new forest growing in what was formerly savanna meant that all of Gaviotas' operations became carbon negative, and an estimated 250 species have been found to grow in the Gaviotas forests.
Stagnation after resin boom.
By the mid 2000s, Gaviotas also started experimenting with mixed plantations of African oil palms and other plants. the hypothesis was that similarly to the pine trees, oil palms would grow better amongst other plants instead of as a monoculture. The oil palms were used to make biofuel to feed all of Gaviotas' machines and vehicles, making the community fuel self-sufficient.
Lugari's initial intention was to settle the Llanos, finding ways to support large populations here in a manner that was not environmentally destructive. However, the population of Gaviotas was still only around 200 people 30 years after founding, although around 2000 people still made a living through Gaviotas and many families in the region sent their children to study at the Gaviotas school. Gaviotas had generated much enthusiasm throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with president Belisario Betancur proposing to build a city called Tropicalia which would essentially be a large-scale replication of Gaviotas. However, Gaviotas struggled to grow past the mid 1990s. As much as armed groups respected Gaviotas' neutrality, the armed conflict put many government plans on the back burner and deeply affected Colombia's economy. The entire Llanos region became a no-go zone for many, to the point Gaviotas had to discourage foreign visitors since foreigners became prime targets for kidnappings. This was also one of the reasons manufacturing was more concentrated in Gaviotas' factory in Bogotá.
Different factors also meant Gaviotas continued to struggle economically. After supplying virtually the entire Colombian market for pine resin, China flooded the market with cheap resin from its western provinces, sending prices plummeting. Gaviotas had to diversify and started selling bottled water from the clean aquifers under their forest. Their bottles were designed like legos that could fit with each other, and were used as toys that became known as 'poor people legos' or were filled with sand and used as bricks for construction. Gaviotas sold water bottles to many upscale restaurants, stipulating that all bottles must be returned to Gaviotas to be repurposed.
Guiding Principles of Gaviotas.
Gaviotas was defined by Lugari as a 'human settlement of tropical rationality'. The driving principle behind Gaviotas was to shed the colonial tradition of countries like Colombia to be dependent on the cultural and technological dictates from Northern countries. 10 founding principles were outlined as Gaviotas got started:
Gaviotas has a deep commitment and interest in technology, but they believe technology needs to work for the enrichment of human existence, not become a steamroller that turns on its inventors and crushes them. Furthermore, this technology needs to reduce environmental harm compared to alternatives, improve nature in some way or at the very least minimize harm as much as possible.
Many visitors and journalists over the years have defined Gaviotas as a utopia, a characterization that Lugari and Gaviotans reject. A utopia literally means 'no place', so Gaviotas is referred to as a 'topia' because it is real. It is a place of action and experimentation rather than an idealized place.
Governments from Thailand, Malaysia, Caribbean countries and even China wanted to implement