Peasant Colombia

Also available in English with the title: Rural Colombia

After having been officially launched by the Ministry of Culture during the great craft event of the Smithonian Institution held recently in Washington, for which it commissioned its reissue, Villegas Editores puts into commercial circulation the book Colombia Campesina, which in 1990 won the Unesco prize for most beautiful book in the world, delivered during the Leipzig Book Fair and later exhibited at the Frankfurt fair that year.

With texts by Manuel Mejía Vallejo, a great Antioquian writer who unfortunately disappeared a few years ago, and photographic material from a large group of excellent Colombian photographers, Colombia Campesina is a tribute to the rural population of our country where the farmer, the rancher, the artisan, the harvester of different products throughout the country, the fisherman, the farmer carries out incessant activity in the midst of immense uncertainties to produce the food that the nation requires.

Colombia Campesina is also a recognition of the peasant in his habits and customs, in his festivals and recreational activities, in the effort of his work and in the value of his contribution to our most beloved traditions, many of them happily preserved in the identity of his terroir

The entire rural country is recorded in the pages of this book, as a sum of small literary vignettes where the smell of the earth goes hand in hand with the Mohan or the Madremonte, where the sun of the moor is confused with the rainbow after the tempest, where coffee and corn and potatoes compete with sugar cane, tobacco and fruits for the written and graphic space of the work, and where folklore and the daily life of farms and small towns are appreciated in its beauty and the emotion of an idiosyncrasy inserted in one of the most beautiful territories in the world.

Peasant Colombia is undoubtedly a book that we were missing, and that returns enriched by current images that corroborate that Colombia continues to be good, tender, positive and beautiful in the midst of the difficulties that are not lacking in national life and particularly in the peasant sector