Latest news with #Muisca
Metro
an hour ago
- Science
- Metro
6,000-year-old mystery skeletons could rewrite human history
A collection of 6,000-year-old skeletons have been discovered in Colombia that do not match any indigenous human population in the region. Archaeologists believe the remains of hunter gatherers, discovered at theChecua site near the country's capital of Bogotá, could shine a fresh light on human history. Analysis of DNA of the 21 skeletons which date from 500 to 6,000 years ago has helped piece together how the unique genetic structure of the earliest beings to live in South America disappeared from later populations. Seven of the specimans were from the Checua period, while nine were from the later Herrera period around 2,000 years ago. A further three remains dated from the Muisca period, around 1,200 to 500 years and the last two were around 530 years old and from the Guane populations north of Bogotá. The study has found that the Checuan individuals did not share genetic with any other ancient groups, either in surrounding countries such as Brazil or Chile, or in North America. Lead author and PhD student at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution in Germany, Kim-Louise Krettek, said that the findings show that there was a complete exchange in population in the Bogotá Altiplano highlands around 2,000 years ago. The Checua population was entirely replaced by those with DNA resembling ancient Panamanians and modern Chibchan-speaking groups from Costa Rica and Panama. Scholars still debate when the first humans arrived in South America, with evidence of life in Monte Verde II, iChile, as far back as 14,550 years ago. The new arrivals in the Bogotá Altiplano marked the beginning of the Herrera period around 2,800 years ago, with the tradition known for farming and pottery. Andrea Casas-Vargas, a researcher at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and co-author of the study, said the complete erasure of a unique genetic lineage is rare in South America, where DNA continuity has been observed over long periods of time. She added that branches of the languages spoken by the immigrant Central American population who replaced the Checuans remain in use. But researchers believe the population change came about gradually by migration and cultural exchange rather than a military invasion, MailOnline reported. Further unknown populations may remain undiscovered and unexcavated, scientists believe, with the latest breakthrough possibly just the tip of the iceberg. Surrounding areas such as western Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela have yet to be genetically analysed. More Trending 'Questions about history and origins touch upon a sensitive area of the self-perception and identity of the Indigenous population', said Professor Cosimo Prosth. As technology and research advances, more information is being uncovered about human history. In Indonesia, fragments of a human ancestor's skull dating back to 140,000 years were discovered among the sea floor. The skull fossil belonging to the Homo erectrus revealed that the human predecessor might have co-existed along its modern human relatives longer than has been thought. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Colombian presidential candidate 'fighting for life' after being shot in the head MORE: Network of Victorian tunnels discovered under massive Surrey sinkhole MORE: Scientists reveal truth behind 'UFO' spotted in major city with 'cryptic message'
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Ancient DNA reveals mysterious Indigenous group from Colombia that disappeared 2,000 years ago
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A new analysis of ancient DNA from hunter-gatherers who lived millennia to centuries ago has revealed a previously unknown genetic lineage of humans who lived in what is now Colombia. People of this lineage lived near present-day Bogotá around 6,000 years ago but disappeared around 4,000 years later, according to a study published May 28 in the journal Science Advances. The findings could shed light on major cultural changes that occurred during that time. It's thought that the first Americans journeyed along the Bering Land Bridge from Asia during the last ice age and arrived in North America at least 23,000 years ago, according to trackways found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. It's still debated when the first people arrived in South America, but there's evidence of people at the site of Monte Verde II, in Chile, from 14,550 years ago. Some of the early Indigenous people who reached South America settled in the Altiplano, a plateau near what is now Bogotá. This region underwent several cultural shifts during the Early and Middle Holocene (11,700 to 4,000 years ago), and researchers already knew about the development of a type of ceramic pottery that emerged during the Herrera period beginning about 2,800 years ago. But how this technology came to the area is still a matter of debate. To investigate ancient population movements in the region, researchers sequenced genomes using samples from the bones and teeth of 21 skeletons from five archaeological sites in the Altiplano spanning a period of 5,500 years. These included seven genomes from a site known as Checua dating back 6,000 years, nine from the Herrera period around 2,000 years ago, three from the Muisca period, whose remains date to 1,200 to 500 years ago, and two from Guane populations north of Bogotá about 530 years ago. "These are the first ancient human genomes from Colombia ever to be published," study co-author Cosimo Posth, a paleogeneticist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said in a statement. The genomes from the Checua site belonged to a relatively small group of hunter-gatherers, the team found. Their DNA isn't particularly similar to that of Indigenous North American groups, nor to any ancient or modern populations in Central or South America. "Our results show that the Checua individuals derive from the earliest population that spread and differentiated across South America very rapidly," study co-author Kim-Louise Krettek, a doctoral student at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, said in the statement. But some 4,000 years later, that population had completely vanished. Evidence of their DNA wasn't present in later groups who inhabited the region, either. "We couldn't find descendants of these early hunter-gatherers of the Colombian high plains — the genes were not passed on," Krettek said. "That means in the area around Bogotá there was a complete exchange of the population." The findings suggest that cultural changes that occurred at the start of the Herrera period, such as the more widespread use of ceramics, were brought into the region by migrating groups from Central America into South America sometime between 6,000 and 2,000 years ago. "In addition to technological developments such as ceramics, the people of this second migration probably also brought the Chibchan languages into what is present-day Colombia," study co-author Andrea Casas-Vargas, a geneticist at the National University of Colombia, said in the statement. "Branches of this language family are still spoken in Central America today." Chibchan speakers were widespread in the Altiplano at the time of European contact, and genetic markers linked to people who spoke Chibchan languages first appeared there 2,000 years ago. RELATED STORIES —Newly discovered 'ghost' lineage linked to ancient mystery population in Tibet, DNA study finds —'Mystery population' of human ancestors gave us 20% of our genes and may have boosted our brain function —Unknown human lineage lived in 'Green Sahara' 7,000 years ago, ancient DNA reveals The Chibchan-related ancestry may have spread and mixed with other groups on multiple occasions. The genetic composition of later Altiplano individuals is more similar to that of pre-Hispanic individuals from Panama than to Indigenous Colombians, suggesting some mixing in Colombia. Ancient remains from Venezuela also carry some Chibchan-related ancestry, though they aren't as closely linked to ancient Colombians. This suggests the possibility of multiple Chibchan language expansions into South America. Future studies could involve sequencing more ancient genomes in the Altiplano and nearby regions, the researchers wrote in the study. Such research might help narrow down when Central American populations arrived in the region and how widespread they became.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A New Way of Thinking About the Climate
In Bogotá, Colombia, where I am researching a unique Andean ecosystem, I've encountered the phrase 'Agua es vida' everywhere. From a city employee explaining why water rationing is necessary; from our nanny, who tells me that she would rather have days without electricity than without running water; from a man speaking about the pollution that mining precious metals for cellphone chips is causing on the Vaupés River. Water is life. The phrase has also been used as a rallying cry. Those organizing in opposition to pipelines in South Dakota, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Rhode Island carry the dictum on their lips. I am tempted to dismiss it as cliché, an environmental platitude, yet there is something enchanting about these words, a kind of spell they cast, which gently tugs me toward some blunt, yet hard to grasp, truth. When Angela Auambari, a Muisca woman I was recently interviewing, said the phrase again, I asked her what she meant by it. 'You can put water in tubes to send it into our homes, and yet that water will always have a life of its own,' she told me. I explained that in grade school I was taught that a tree is alive, a bird is alive, but a lake is not. 'You and I are women; we give life,' Angela countered. She gestured to the open window above us, through which the laughter of my 1-year-old daughter traveled. 'The lakes up in the hills, the rivers that connect them to us, they, too, give life, and for this reason, they are alive. Agua es vida.' I understood what she meant. I even agreed with her. Still, what separates living, breathing beings from inanimate matter remains frustratingly set in my mind. Stones, no; seagulls, yes. The entire scientific tradition, from Descartes down to Linnaeus and Darwin, is built upon this division. Nevertheless, as climate change superheats the planet, things we have long been taught to think of as inert are springing into action: ice sheets splintering, flood-prone rivers devouring mountain towns, wildfires consuming Paradise. Those who live on the front lines of these eruptions don't have the luxury of encountering the Earth as anything other than animate. In his new book, Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane, one of the most significant nature writers of his generation, attempts to unlearn this persistent and damaging distinction. By exploring four extraordinary bodies of water and the people and laws aiming to protect them, Macfarlane examines a question whose time has come, whether we like it or not. The current environmental catastrophe is a problem not only of missed emissions targets but also of the human imagination, as the writer Amitav Ghosh has argued. 'Our plight is a consequence of the ways in which certain classes of humans––a small minority, in fact––have actively muted others by representing them as brutes, as creatures whose presence on earth is solely material,' Ghosh argues in his 2022 book, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Human stories have historically refused to recognize that these others—both human others, and also things like gold, glaciers, bacteria, the jet stream; the list goes on and on—shape us just as much as we shape them. Ours is the language that makes extraction possible. People need new narratives, Ghosh insists, that foreground nonhuman actors in order to slow this planetary cataclysm. (The time for averting it has long since passed.) [Read: As the climate changes, so does fiction] Some view the solution through a legal lens. If we can recognize these 'brutes' as beings to whom basic rights are granted––think: the river's right to flow unimpeded and unpolluted––our relationship to nature will evolve. This kind of thinking has led to the rise of a growing global phenomenon known as the Rights of Nature movement. Ecuador, Panama, New Zealand, Bolivia, India, and even some cities in the United States have––thanks, in most cases, to pressure from local Indigenous groups––enshrined the rights of nature in their governing documents. These rights can serve as potent legal tools in the battle to stop practices such as fracking, mining, deforestation, and the damming of rivers. Early on in his book, Macfarlane recalls telling his son the title of his project. The son's response is plain: 'Well, duh, that's going to be a short book then, Dad, because the answer is yes!' Of course a river is alive. The pair have recently visited springs near their home. 'I cannot quite understand why we are going,' Macfarlane writes, 'but I hold hands with Will and together we cross the threshold between the hot light of the fields and the wood's cool.' There they discover that the water has all but disappeared after months of record-breaking heat. Through the book, father and son will return regularly to these springs, bearing witness to their changes. This punctuated in-placeness is what makes the three longer journeys Macfarlane undertakes––to an Andean cloud forest; a wounded river basin in Chennai, India; and an undamned river in uppermost Canada––land effectively. To learn to recognize the aliveness of what we have been taught to think of as inert matter demands, above all else, time and attention. To see a glacier retreat, we need to watch its movements for years; to know how a river wanders, we must walk its banks during both flood and drought. Most of the children in my life stare awestruck at the natural world. Trees speak, mountains ponder, hummingbirds have secret missions all their own. With time, this enchantment usually passes. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author, argues that this is, in part, a linguistic problem. In English, we use the impersonal pronoun it to speak of animals, plants, bodies of water, geographical features. We say 'a river that flows' as opposed to 'a river who flows.' As I read Is a River Alive?, I found myself underlining sentence after sentence as verbs animated the world. 'Leaves nod in the rain.' 'Mist hangs in scarves.' 'The light of the rising sun sets the world ringing like a singing bowl.' Macfarlane's prose offers a glorious invitation to return to one's child-mind and its inherent wonder. Agua es vida. And yet this deep sense of enchantment and play is tempered throughout by grief—not only grief at the ways in which humans have fundamentally perverted so many of Earth's most magnificent rivers, but also grief of a more personal nature. The researcher seeking rare fungi at the Los Cedros cloud forest, in Ecuador, has just lost her father; the young man fighting to restore India's Adyar River was beaten by his own; Wayne, Macfarlane's traveling companion down the Mutehekau Shipu, in Quebec, dreams of encountering a dear friend who recently died. In the face of these losses, each person travels to a water body, dwelling in and alongside them for weeks or years. Each is, in turn, overtaken by powers much larger than the self. And I won't say they are healed exactly, but their time spent on the rivers seems to lighten their individual burdens. 'Perhaps the body knows what the mind cannot,' Macfarlane writes. 'Days on the water have produced in me the intensifying feeling of somehow growing together with the river: not thinking with it, but being thought by it.' Then Wayne cautions, 'This kind of merging doesn't happen as an epiphany; it's a chronic rather than acute process.' [Read: What it would take to see the world completely differently] The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie has critiqued Macfarlane's earlier work as falling into an environmental tradition that she shorthands as the 'Lone Enraptured Male.' In these stories, as she frames it, white men sally forth into the wilderness, where they have some kind of conversion experience, then return to normal society enlightened and changed. Some of that is certainly at work here, especially in the book's final journey, a two-week whitewater-kayaking trip. But for the most part, Macfarlane doesn't dwell too long on his own experience, opting instead to listen to those who live alongside the water bodies that he is, admittedly, just visiting. For instance, Macfarlane is accompanied at Los Cedros by a wide-ranging cast of characters: the mycologist in mourning, who discovers a new species of fungus that provides further protection to the forest; an expatriate who has camped there for years to keep the place from falling prey to illegal attempts at mining; a legal scholar 'trying to generate and accelerate the ripples of Rights of Nature thinking worldwide.' A few years prior to Macfarlane's sojourn, foreign companies purchased the right to potentially mine at Los Cedros. But when they began circling with chain saws, de-limbers, and log loaders, locals testified to the impact such actions would have on the river that runs deep into the forest. The judges who ruled that mining copper and gold would violate the river's rights—they also join Macfarlane at Los Cedros. Extending out from this water body is a rich web of human allies, each of whom plays a key role in its protection. Macfarlane makes this web visible. Unlearning our obsession with Cartesian thinking demands humility, a willingness to let the lines blur between us and that great plane of existence that we have learned to label as 'it.' Is a River Alive? illustrates what resistance to extraction can look like on the ground, and also what might be awakened in us when we begin to live with rivers, recognizing them as co-creators of our past, our present, and—more and more—our future. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
26-05-2025
- General
- Atlantic
A New Way of Thinking About the Climate
In Bogotá, Colombia, where I am researching a unique Andean ecosystem, I've encountered the phrase ' Agua es vida ' everywhere. From a city employee explaining why water rationing is necessary; from our nanny, who tells me that she would rather have days without electricity than without running water; from a man speaking about the pollution that mining precious metals for cellphone chips is causing on the Vaupés River. Water is life. The phrase has also been used as a rallying cry. Those organizing in opposition to pipelines in South Dakota, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Rhode Island carry the dictum on their lips. I am tempted to dismiss it as cliché, an environmental platitude, yet there is something enchanting about these words, a kind of spell they cast, which gently tugs me toward some blunt, yet hard to grasp, truth. When Angela Auambari, a Muisca woman I was recently interviewing, said the phrase again, I asked her what she meant by it. 'You can put water in tubes to send it into our homes, and yet that water will always have a life of its own,' she told me. I explained that in grade school I was taught that a tree is alive, a bird is alive, but a lake is not. 'You and I are women; we give life,' Angela countered. She gestured to the open window above us, through which the laughter of my 1-year-old daughter traveled. 'The lakes up in the hills, the rivers that connect them to us, they, too, give life, and for this reason, they are alive. Agua es vida.' I understood what she meant. I even agreed with her. Still, what separates living, breathing beings from inanimate matter remains frustratingly set in my mind. Stones, no; seagulls, yes. The entire scientific tradition, from Descartes down to Linnaeus and Darwin, is built upon this division. Nevertheless, as climate change superheats the planet, things we have long been taught to think of as inert are springing into action: ice sheets splintering, flood-prone rivers devouring mountain towns, wildfires consuming Paradise. Those who live on the front lines of these eruptions don't have the luxury of encountering the Earth as anything other than animate. In his new book, Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane, one of the most significant nature writers of his generation, attempts to unlearn this persistent and damaging distinction. By exploring four extraordinary bodies of water and the people and laws aiming to protect them, Macfarlane examines a question whose time has come, whether we like it or not. The current environmental catastrophe is a problem not only of missed emissions targets but also of the human imagination, as the writer Amitav Ghosh has argued. 'Our plight is a consequence of the ways in which certain classes of humans––a small minority, in fact––have actively muted others by representing them as brutes, as creatures whose presence on earth is solely material,' Ghosh argues in his 2022 book, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Human stories have historically refused to recognize that these others—both human others, and also things like gold, glaciers, bacteria, the jet stream; the list goes on and on—shape us just as much as we shape them. Ours is the language that makes extraction possible. People need new narratives, Ghosh insists, that foreground nonhuman actors in order to slow this planetary cataclysm. (The time for averting it has long since passed.) Read: As the climate changes, so does fiction Some view the solution through a legal lens. If we can recognize these 'brutes' as beings to whom basic rights are granted––think: the river's right to flow unimpeded and unpolluted––our relationship to nature will evolve. This kind of thinking has led to the rise of a growing global phenomenon known as the Rights of Nature movement. Ecuador, Panama, New Zealand, Bolivia, India, and even some cities in the United States have––thanks, in most cases, to pressure from local Indigenous groups––enshrined the rights of nature in their governing documents. These rights can serve as potent legal tools in the battle to stop practices such as fracking, mining, deforestation, and the damming of rivers. Early on in his book, Macfarlane recalls telling his son the title of his project. The son's response is plain: 'Well, duh, that's going to be a short book then, Dad, because the answer is yes!' Of course a river is alive. The pair have recently visited springs near their home. 'I cannot quite understand why we are going,' Macfarlane writes, 'but I hold hands with Will and together we cross the threshold between the hot light of the fields and the wood's cool.' There they discover that the water has all but disappeared after months of record-breaking heat. Through the book, father and son will return regularly to these springs, bearing witness to their changes. This punctuated in-placeness is what makes the three longer journeys Macfarlane undertakes––to an Andean cloud forest; a wounded river basin in Chennai, India; and an undamned river in uppermost Canada––land effectively. To learn to recognize the aliveness of what we have been taught to think of as inert matter demands, above all else, time and attention. To see a glacier retreat, we need to watch its movements for years; to know how a river wanders, we must walk its banks during both flood and drought. Most of the children in my life stare awestruck at the natural world. Trees speak, mountains ponder, hummingbirds have secret missions all their own. With time, this enchantment usually passes. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author, argues that this is, in part, a linguistic problem. In English, we use the impersonal pronoun it to speak of animals, plants, bodies of water, geographical features. We say 'a river that flows' as opposed to 'a river who flows.' As I read Is a River Alive?, I found myself underlining sentence after sentence as verbs animated the world. 'Leaves nod in the rain.' 'Mist hangs in scarves.' 'The light of the rising sun sets the world ringing like a singing bowl.' Macfarlane's prose offers a glorious invitation to return to one's child-mind and its inherent wonder. Agua es vida. And yet this deep sense of enchantment and play is tempered throughout by grief—not only grief at the ways in which humans have fundamentally perverted so many of Earth's most magnificent rivers, but also grief of a more personal nature. The researcher seeking rare fungi at the Los Cedros cloud forest, in Ecuador, has just lost her father; the young man fighting to restore India's Adyar River was beaten by his own; Wayne, Macfarlane's traveling companion down the Mutehekau Shipu, in Quebec, dreams of encountering a dear friend who recently died. In the face of these losses, each person travels to a water body, dwelling in and alongside them for weeks or years. Each is, in turn, overtaken by powers much larger than the self. And I won't say they are healed exactly, but their time spent on the rivers seems to lighten their individual burdens. 'Perhaps the body knows what the mind cannot,' Macfarlane writes. 'Days on the water have produced in me the intensifying feeling of somehow growing together with the river: not thinking with it, but being thought by it.' Then Wayne cautions, 'This kind of merging doesn't happen as an epiphany; it's a chronic rather than acute process.' The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie has critiqued Macfarlane's earlier work as falling into an environmental tradition that she shorthands as the ' Lone Enraptured Male.' In these stories, as she frames it, white men sally forth into the wilderness, where they have some kind of conversion experience, then return to normal society enlightened and changed. Some of that is certainly at work here, especially in the book's final journey, a two-week whitewater-kayaking trip. But for the most part, Macfarlane doesn't dwell too long on his own experience, opting instead to listen to those who live alongside the water bodies that he is, admittedly, just visiting. For instance, Macfarlane is accompanied at Los Cedros by a wide-ranging cast of characters: the mycologist in mourning, who discovers a new species of fungus that provides further protection to the forest; an expatriate who has camped there for years to keep the place from falling prey to illegal attempts at mining; a legal scholar 'trying to generate and accelerate the ripples of Rights of Nature thinking worldwide.' A few years prior to Macfarlane's sojourn, foreign companies purchased the right to potentially mine at Los Cedros. But when they began circling with chain saws, de-limbers, and log loaders, locals testified to the impact such actions would have on the river that runs deep into the forest. The judges who ruled that mining copper and gold would violate the river's rights—they also join Macfarlane at Los Cedros. Extending out from this water body is a rich web of human allies, each of whom plays a key role in its protection. Macfarlane makes this web visible. Unlearning our obsession with Cartesian thinking demands humility, a willingness to let the lines blur between us and that great plane of existence that we have learned to label as 'it.' Is a River Alive? illustrates what resistance to extraction can look like on the ground, and also what might be awakened in us when we begin to live with rivers, recognizing them as co-creators of our past, our present, and—more and more—our future.
USA Today
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
The haunting beauty of Hotel Del Salto: The real-life inspiration behind this new novel
The haunting beauty of Hotel Del Salto: The real-life inspiration behind this new novel Some places jump off the page. Others, you jump into. Perched on the edge of a cliff in Cundinamarca, Colombia, the Hotel Del Salto is a relic of the opulence and horrors of colonialism. Its grand facade, looming over the misty abyss of Tequendama Falls, is the kind of place that invites amazement and a little unease. The abandoned mansion turned museum has long been rumored to be haunted. It is also the eerie real-life inspiration for Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro's gothic horror novel 'Bochica,' publishing in May 2025 by Primero Sueño Press. 'I first visited the site in 2016 with my brother,' Flórez-Cerchiaro told USA TODAY. 'He's also fascinated by the supernatural and eerie history, and I remember standing there, looking at the house and the waterfall, and thinking, 'This would be the perfect setting for a horror novel.' I even posted a photo on Facebook with that exact caption.' Almost a decade after that visit, the setting in 'Bochica' mirrors the hotel's grandiosity and unsettling atmosphere. The novel's central mansion, much like the real Hotel Del Salto, is a structure that does not belong – a colonial wound embedded into Muisca land. The Muisca people, indigenous to the region, hold Tequendama Falls as a sacred place. 'I wanted to avoid the common horror trope of vilifying indigenous history – so often, horror stories frame native beliefs as 'curses' rather than acknowledging their sacred importance,' Flórez-Cerchiaro said. According to legend, when the Spanish invaded, some Muisca chose to leap from the waterfall rather than surrender, believing they would be transformed into condors, soaring to freedom. 'The moment you arrive, you feel this overwhelming mix of beauty and tragedy. The house itself is imposing, and then you have this massive waterfall right across from it,' Flórez-Cerchiaro said. 'I wouldn't call myself a true believer in the supernatural, but there's an energy there. It's peaceful yet unsettling.' Who benefits from the land? Hotel Del Salto, originally a luxurious residence, became a hotel in 1928 to cater to the Colombian elite visiting Tequendama Falls. However, the building was abandoned in the 1990s, partly due to declining tourism and the contamination of the Bogotá River. Its reputation took a darker turn as it became infamous as a suicide site. The aura of Hotel Del Salto is precisely what Flórez-Cerchiaro channels in her novel as she recounts the heaviness felt in the area and the superstition of not getting too close out of fear of being pulled. 'Isolation is a crucial gothic element, and this place is the definition of it. You have a house built on sacred land, far from everything,' Flórez-Cerchiaro said. 'Then, you bring in history – this land belonged to the Muisca people. To them, (Tequendama Falls) was sacred ... Then, a mansion is built there. It's a mix of colonialism, erasure, and a house that shouldn't exist.' Her novel 'Bochica' follows Antonia, a woman who returns to the isolated estate of her childhood only to confront its violent past. The mansion in 'Bochica' is a place where the supernatural and historical trauma are entwined, much like Hotel Del Salto itself. "The mansion in my book, much like the real Hotel Del Salto, was built for the elite to enjoy breathtaking views. But what about the history that came before? That land wasn't empty – it was sacred. The hotel was built for tourism, but who gets to benefit from it?' Flórez-Cerchiaro added. 'Even today, the real site is being restored as a museum, which has good intentions, but good intentions can allow abuse.' Today, the once-abandoned Hotel Del Salto has been repurposed as the Tequendama Falls Museum of Biodiversity and Culture. But despite its new role, the eerie stories remain. 'Gothic horror has always been a great lens for exploring women's power – or lack of it,' Flórez-Cerchiaro said. 'It's a horror novel, yes, but it's also about what women are willing to risk to have control over their own lives.' For travelers drawn to the macabre, visiting Hotel Del Salto is an opportunity to step into a setting where history and horror mix together. The museum offers an educational experience on the region's biodiversity and cultural heritage. And for those who want to experience the haunted beauty of the place without boarding a plane to Colombia, 'Bochica' offers a convenient alternative. 'There's a line in the book that says that the house is so beautiful, but it's a disguise to a lot of suffering that goes far beyond ... just Antonia and her family's suffering,' Flórez-Cerchiaro said. 'It goes way deeper. I think that we should be acknowledging all of it. Not to say that we have to stop visiting places (like this), but you know, just acknowledge the history.'
