Sitting on the north edge of the Colombian coast, La Guajira is a place of great ‘beauty and strangeness’
On the far north edge of Colombia there is a desert peninsula the size of Wales, where Arizona-like landscapes meet the sparkling waters of the Caribbean. Home to the indigenous Wayuu people, La Guajira is a place of great “beauty and strangeness”, said Ruaridh Nicoll in the Financial Times. The Wayuu resisted Spanish colonisation, and have since suffered persecution by the Catholic Church, the Colombian state and the country’s ubiquitous drug cartels. But lately, “life has been stabilising”, and tourists have begun to trickle to the peninsula, “some come to surf, others to sandboard down 60-metre-high dunes, and some just to swing in hammocks” beside the region’s wild beaches.
