This image chronicle is more than a simple road journey. It is the fleeting story of a few hours and just over 200 kilometers traveled by car between two Colombian cities: Cartagena de Indias and Santa Marta. A journey that, as sings Montañez Poloit reminds me of that “beautiful and good” Colombia, but that, in my case, it was rather a journey in the opposite of the song (“Bogotá, Santa Marta, Barranquilla and Cartagena, plays!”), From the sea towards the mountains, from the Caribbean to the south.
They are just 4 hours on the road, but in that period the images happen without pause: houses, trucks, people, landscape and life in general seemed to move at a speed that only the camera shutter could capture.
Photo after photo, I was drawing a visual map of the trip, so that each snapshot would help me compose a navigation letter in the middle of the bustle and the beauty of the region.
The route extends parallel to the Colombian coast, bordering the Caribbean Sea, on the Caribbean trunk, also known as the National Route 90. This road is much more than a simple road corridor: it is a bridge between local cultures that tell themselves.
Although the roads are designed to connect towns and cities, in this case, the route carries the footprint of something intangible and powerful, as a sacred book. And here, in the very heart of the region, Aracataca is located, the people who saw Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize for Literature (1982). A small town, south of Santa Marta.
In these “magical realism” paths it is not a literary concept but a palpable experience. The road, like the author’s narrative style, comes alive in the midst of a landscape that seems to escape the limits of the possible.
When traveling those kilometers, we immerse ourselves in a universe in which magic is intertwined with everyday reality. The vibrant colors of the houses, the sea that melts with the sky, the hustle GARCIAMARQUIANO lived in broad daylight.
The Gabo once said that he was only “the notary of reality.” And that phrase was the leitmotiv of the photos that I was taking from my window along this path. It was only 4 hours, but time seems to have been suspended in some corner of this region, in these images where stories and memories are intertwined with the same force as the waters of the sea.
