The Bogotá Savanna

Sabana de Bogotá is a book that bears witness to the beauty of this land, to its
ancient and fertile wonder. This unique work is by Juan Ramón Giraldo
Arciniegas, a photographer and traveler who stayed to live in the Sabana in order to
understand it. This meant waiting for it to patiently surrender its
secrets, in its misty and cold dawns or in its sunsets that are the
authentic El Dorado, to capture them with his camera and offer them to us.
Published in 1988, unfortunately in this new century, it is a nostalgic archive
and portrait of that Bogotá savanna that we are losing at an accelerated pace,
due in part to illegal or "legal" urbanization that offers buyers of
masses of cement "green corridors" and "spacious gardens" where there once were
meadows and wetlands.

Here are its gentle hills, its roads, its mists that announce the
proximity of rains or summer, its trees, its waters and its silences!
We know of the veneration of the wise and ancient Muiscas for water and the
nature of the savanna; over time, its green and astonishing charm
captivated chroniclers, poets, and writers. The book quotes fragments from them
to accompany the photographs, confirming in writing its truth, its beauty, and its
permanence within us.

The author says: "Aware of this importance and the uniqueness of the Sabana
de Bogotá, of its unusual presence in the middle of the tropics, of its inexplicable mixture
of sensuality and melancholy, we have worked for several years photographing
its most unexpected moments, its most secluded places and all the majesty
of its splendor and its mystery, to return to this place the awe that
it aroused in Don Juan de Castellanos and Alexander von Humboldt, and the loyalty that
it awakened in its cultivators and landowners, such as Don Tomás Rueda Vargas."
Nobel laureate in literature Gabriel García Márquez, in an interview pays this
surprising tribute, recalling his ascent to the "cold land":
"I thought I was arriving at the most beautiful place on earth... and I still believe it."
And the distinguished writer Germán Arciniegas completes this appreciation:
"...for those who come to our tropics resolved to find the dazzling splendor
of a sun that ignites and excites everything, this Sabana disorients them with what
could be called the tropics in reverse..."