Two-thirds of Colombians live in one Andean river’s basin
Colombia’s Magdalena River runs about 1,528 kilometres from Huila’s cordillera split to Barranquilla’s Bocas de Ceniza on the Caribbean. Its 273,000-square-kilometre basin covers twenty-four percent of national land yet holds sixty-six percent of the population.
Named for Mary Magdalene, it is the largest river system of the northern Andes. The valley between Cordillera Central and Oriental filled with Tertiary sediments before Upper, Middle, and Lower segments organized today’s transport spine. After reaching the coastal plain near nine degrees north, the channel doglegs west about 100 kilometres then north again to the sea. From páramo at its source it passes dry forest, then rainforest in its middle course, and swamps near the coast, where spectacled caimans, green iguanas and brown pelicans are common.
Including the Cauca, the basin hosted 213 known fish species as of 2008, with more described since. Yet harvests crashed about ninety percent between 1975 and 2008 under pollution, siltation, and habitat loss. The most productive Colombian fisheries still cluster here even as pressures mount. Wildlife includes the brown spider monkey, the endemic blue-billed curassow and a butterfly, the Magdalena Valley ringlet, first described in 2009. A stranger threat comes from hippos brought in by Pablo Escobar, which went feral after his death and spread from Hacienda Nápoles into the river.
Long before the Spanish, Carib-speaking Panche and Yariguí peoples travelled up its western bank, while the Muisca on the east knew the river as Yuma. Rodrigo de Bastidas reached and named it on 1 April 1501, and through the colonial era it was the only route linking Bogotá to Cartagena and so to Europe. Europeans first met the potato in its valley in 1537.
Pierre Labatut and Simón Bolívar fought their Magdalena Campaign along it. Congress granted Juan Bernardo Elbers a steamboat concession in 1825, and although his company soon folded, steamers plied the river regularly from 1845 until the last retired in 1961.
Source: Magdalena River
