ECO VILLAGE ON BIG ISLAND
(Rosary Island)
Nowadays, there are about 17 Eco-Villages in Colombia,
which are communities where teaching and researching
sustainable lifestyles are promoted. Those are located on
Rosary Island 50 minutes off Cartagena (Bolivar). Big Island
is bordered in the north to the Caribbean Coast of Colombia.
Eco-village is a rural community which wants to be sustainable in social, ecological and economical
aspects; its development is based on the fact that human being respects for nature in terms of the use
of renewable energy such as, the economy sustainable, recycling the use of ecological materials
where the renewable’, sustainable’ and economical’ are the key words.
According to Robert Gilman, in his book: Eco-villages and Sustainable Communities (1991), he
claims: “Human scale full-featured settlement in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into
the natural world in a way that it supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully
continued into the indefinite future”. This was the first definition on which the eco-village movement
was founded and it is still considered by a high percent of authors. Near Cartagena, on Rosary
Islands Archipelago (27 islands), Orika is located.
Orika is the name of the community which lives in a small town on the Big Island, it has 900 families approximately who live from
fishing, agriculture and handicrafts; most of the population found on this island is mainly children and teenagers. The Orikas people
claim all of them live in a magic world because of the lovely landscape which surrounds them, despite the troubles they have
experienced over the last two decades; it is an amazing adventure to visit Big Island because you can learn new experiences like taking
showers with rain water collection, sleeping in hammocks or beds in small wooden huts protected with mosquito net or pitch a tent on
soft sand and so on.
Big Island has 3 ecosystems: Mangrove Swamps, Coral Reef and Dry Tropical Forest. Orika is a community with the purpose of
getting a better way of life since they were located in isolated areas where everything was Mangroves, Water and Nature around them.
The Community Group is a highest organization which represents their town as the
ethnic group (Africans), Orikas are carrying out a great variety of sustainable activities
in order to be an eco-village, and they protect the environment, preserve nature and
they also like to innovate.
In this small town near Barú Island, community uses a cistern to store and reuse
rainwater, eco-hotels supply drinking water to satisfy both the visitors and those who
live here, and handicrafts are made of recycled material; tourists are not going to find
comfortable rooms with private bath but dry bathrooms for saving water.
There, you can find 25 breadwinner mothers that struggle to support their children,
eco-guides, native teenagers who teach tourists about their cultures in Spanish. Orikas
do the ecological guidance and the environmental education that is in order to protect
all those treasures that they have, for instance: lagoons, coral reef, and the rest of
ecosystems with the intention of preserving them for the future generations and at the
same time to live in harmony with nature.
One of the eco-village purposes is to guarantee that tourists help to conserve and to protect the natural resources, besides, they want
to make visitors feel at home and that they are welcome and that they know to live in close contact with nature and to sleep without any
luxuries and comfort.
People of Orika are kind, gentle and helpful who struggle to get on in life and to reach their goals, in fact, today the community has
obtained the collective title and register lands owned by the state after a long and bitter struggle against
the Colombian government.
Big Island is a place that you must visit at least once in life.
“Welcome to Big Island in Colombia”
“We live in harmony with the environment”.
Orika Natives.
By: LEIDYS ADRIANA DUARTE M.