By Diana de la Vega | Directora
August and September brought the island and the city into the same spaces: Punta Arena turned into a film set, the Festival del Amor, the deck of our school vessel, Casa Bolívar in the historic center and the beaches of Cartagena and Punta Arena. Over these two months the women entrepreneurs of the island began a food-handling certification, new visitors discovered the bay with us, and environmental and artistic education kept growing in the island's schools, with the support of students, artists, biologists, volunteers and allies.
Objective 1 · Strengthening the Collective of Artists, Artisans, and Entrepreneurs
On August 25 and 26, our participation in the Festival del Amor in Cartagena gave local artisans a public showcase for their work and opened the door to new strategic alliances. The most important of these is with Universidad Mayor de Cartagena and its Gastronomy program, with which we are building a training and certification model in food handling for the women who run traditional cooking businesses on the island.
The training cycle formally began with its first sessions on September 4 and 14. For these women, whose recipes carry the island's culinary memory, certification is a practical step toward growing their businesses with the standards that visitors and partners expect.
Objective 2 · Community Tourism
On August 3, Punta Arena became a film set. A documentary brought together, in front of the cameras, the student environmental guardians (estudiantes veedores ambientales), the women eco-guides, the artisans and entrepreneurs, and the volunteer artists from the watercolor elective at Bellas Artes. It was a true day of cultural and culinary exchange in the middle of nature: we went birdwatching, and then held a watercolor workshop to illustrate everything we had seen.
On September 10 we sailed at sunset aboard the Antares 71, our school vessel. Leaving at 5:00 p.m., the two-and-a-half-hour journey tells the living history of the region: the colonial port in the Bahía de las Ánimas, the city walls and the imposing Castillo de San Felipe, the mangroves inhabited by herons, pelicans, cormorants and ibises, the Bocagrande breakwater, and the sunset in front of Tierra Bomba. About 20 people joined us, and their contributions sustain our environmental education program. It is one more way of saying what guides all our work: you don't protect what you don't love, and you don't love what you don't know.
Objective 3 · Environmental Education
On September 2 we visited the beautiful community of Bocachica to deliver the second 3D relief map of Colombia donated by Visión Amazonía. The map supports the training of the new student environmental guardians and the school's PRAES (Proyecto Ambiental Escolar, the environmental project every Colombian school carries out). That same day, the Casa de la Cultura hosted an enriching intergenerational exchange with the Escuela Taller de Cartagena.
On September 8, students at the Institución Educativa de Tierra Bomba took the lead by writing, in their own words, the actions needed to care for their school. The aim is for environmental protection to become a shared habit, not an imposed rule.
Meanwhile, Visual Arts students from UNIBAC continued their creative process under the guidance of artist and teacher Teresa Perdomo, with the support of biologists, capturing the flora and birds of the island in watercolor.
Our cultural and conservation agenda also included two successful environmental film screenings from the Trees and Seas festival at Casa Bolívar in Cartagena, on September 18 and 25.
Beach cleanups continued to bring the city and the island together. On August 20, 50 volunteers from Twilio, with the support of PACARIBE, collected close to 50 kilograms of waste, most of it plastic, at Playa 5, across from the Plaza Bocagrande shopping center. In September, cleanups on the beaches of El Laguito and Punta Arena removed 355.4 kilograms of waste with the participation of 90 people: volunteers, eco-guides, the children guardians and the Fundación Bahía team, together with our allies PACARIBE, Veolia, Help Alliance and País Raíz. Each day closed with a cultural moment, from origami cranes folded with our volunteer Hanna to talks on the historical and environmental heritage of the places we visit.
Altogether, over these two months 140 people helped remove around 405 kilograms of waste from our beaches before it could reach the sea.
Looking Ahead
The next chapter opens on October 9, when the Museo Histórico de Cartagena (MUHCA), in the Palacio de la Inquisición, will host our great exhibition of the flora and birds of Punta Arena: Territorio de Agua y Color (Territory of Water and Color). It will present the collection of watercolors painted by local artists and volunteer students from Bellas Artes, the same illustrations that will bring to life two books, the Punta Arena Bird Guide and the Punta Arena Flora Guide.
Both guides were created to strengthen environmental education in the four schools of Tierra Bomba island. What the students saw, named and painted in Punta Arena will now hang in one of the most historic buildings of Cartagena, for the island, for the city and for everyone who comes to visit.
What these two months leave behind is a network of people who now know each other: artisans and art students, eco-guides and volunteers, the children of the island and the families of the city. Thank you for being part of it. We look forward to welcoming you in Punta Arena.
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