Moorlands

This book visually captures Diane Witlin's loving journey through a privilege almost exclusively enjoyed by Colombians: the Andean páramos. It meticulously explores their strange beauty and vast richness, accompanied by a select group of image-makers such as Aldo Brando, José Fernando Machado, Tomas Urbanek, and Álvaro Moreno, taking advantage of the climatic conditions so that the reader can contemplate the páramos both in the enchanting fog and on days of shimmering clarity.

Páramos is a work of admirable beauty. In its extensive photographic selection, it exhibits perhaps the most complete display of páramo flora, fauna, and landscape from the time of its publication, faithfully capturing all the forms, colors, and beauty of the vegetative layer which, most importantly, provides water to a large part of the Andean territory. The cameras of these observers reveal to the whole world the richness, not only biological but also landscape, contained in these high-altitude areas. Páramos is a book that allows a fascinating stroll through an unexpected natural garden. The plants that coexist here have a specialized structure; their biological conformation—as is the case with the frailejones, which have come to symbolize it—develops in rosettes of abundant, woolly, and long leaves designed to capture the largest amount of precious liquid and deliver it to mosses and lichens, liverworts, grasses, and dense shrubs.

In these pages, the city reader can virtually traverse a páramo on a clear day, letting themselves be overwhelmed by the splendor of nature; the landscape is as attractive under the bright sun through a pristine atmosphere as it is when veiled by the dense mist that characterizes it.

The book is supported by the texts of Dr. Álvaro Torres Barreto, an ethologist, biologist, and writer of the first journalistic columns on ecological matters, whose comprehensive knowledge of the páramos further enriches this book with selected stories that help us understand the unique features and the structure of the natural wealth of this wonderful area of Colombia.