Experience Colombia - Expo Milano 2015

Colombia, the country of magical realism

The wind blows from the northern part of Colombia and in the striking landscape of La Guajira it begins to spin the windmills, those enormous knights that Don Quixote saw in his imagination. After playing with the blades for a while, the wind continues along the beaches of Cartagena and cools down the women sunbathing there, before squeezing through the holes in the walls of an ancient city that tells it stories of heroes from long ago. It reaches Medellín and here it races against the Metro. Having lost, the breeze follows the mountain upwards, shakes the coffee leaves until it reaches Bogotà, cold, where it forces people to put their hands in their pockets and seek warmth while it throws itself from a very high building.

The Colombian Nobel Prize winner afflicted by poetry

Since the day he was born, Gabriel García Márquez suffered from the disease of poetry: it was his grandmother who infected him and she told him not to worry about it, but instead to court his illness. This terminal disease accompanied him throughout his life with a sense of melancholy that was not noticeable, but only because he would fight it with music, friends and rum. It was the virus circulating in his blood that made it possible for his complex and fantastic literary universe to exist, and this same universe led him to win the Nobel prize after the publication of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Fonseca, the chameleon artist

He is not a person to find an easy route and then rest on his laurels: Fonseca likes to try, explore and change, even when curiosity and transformations carry risks. Because of this, when he became famous on the radio and began to have more fans, his music continued to evolve, although its roots have always remained the same. After the catchy songs on his first album, influenced by tropical rhythms and dances, Fonseca explored the bolero and folk music like ranchera, llanera music and vallenato, with trips into merengue, salsa, tango and even flamenco. A few years ago, he even recorded an album with the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia.

Carlos Vives, a Colombian-style rock star

The first stage that ever hosted him was a waiting room. He and his brother would serenade the patients of the hospital where their father worked. Their grandmother had first begun to teach them how to play the piano and then the guitar from the age of five years old. Those who knew him back then would have been sure that for Carlos Vives music came first, but they would have been wrong: indeed he would have liked to have become a doctor, like his father. But luckily life, with its hidden signals, had taken upon itself to show him the right road for his creative genius to take.

Wealth is measured in water

Right in the middle of the Andes, especially in the Colombian massif, a treasure is hidden. Although it does not sparkle and it does not add to the jewels that adorn women all over the world, its value exceeds that of all the gold on the planet, because it does not depend on market demand, nor on consumer requests, but on the needs of humankind for survival.

The breathtaking deserts of Colombia

The rain falls softly, very softly. The sky is always clear and the sand sparkles in the sun. Even when simply reading these words a sensation of warmth creeps through the body: this is the effect of the La Guajira desert in the north of Colombia, where it is certainly extremely hot. The temperature reaches 42 degrees on a daily basis even if the heat is not usually stifling thanks to the wind that blows in from the peninsula, a dear ally of the sun which soars, free and refreshing, through the dunes until it reaches the sea again.