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EXPLORING THE RIO CAQUETÀ, COLOMBIA Francesco Sauro The “Quartzites Project”, launched in 1993, is expanding its scope, focusing its efforts on unexplored areas of the South American continent. For many years, we have been following the situation in Colombia and particularly in the Colombian Amazonia area, into which the westernmost limits of the Guiana Shield extend. These are represented by the two massifs of the Sierra Macarena and the Serrania del Chiribiquete. These areas have yet to be studied by speleological expeditions, despite the exploratory and scientific potential being, without doubt, exceptionally high. However, they are very remote places, posing logistical challenges that are even more complex than those of the Venezuelan and Brazilian tepuis. The Chiribiquete National Park is also the world’s largest protected area of forest, renowned for having some of the oldest documented rock paintings in the Americas. This year, finally, it became possible to conduct a survey of these extremely distant zones, concentrating on the area of the Rio Caquetà, to the south of the Chiribiquete. In early February 2020, a five-strong group departed in a Cessna from the city of Villavicencio: Francesco Sauro and Daniela Barbieri for La Venta, along with two American speleologists, Dan Straley and Brady Merrit, and a biospeleologist from the Instituto Humboldt, Carlos Lasso. The objective was to reach the Araracuara landing strip in the Caquetà sector, and from there the villages of the Monochoa native. The region controlled by these indigenous peoples includes the southern part of the quartzite massif of Chiribiquete, but is outside the National Park. As such, the native peoples have absolute authority, and research in the area can only be conducted on their say-so. That said, the situation in this region is still far from peaceful, because the area is intermittently visited also by the FARC revolutionaries and by the pa-
ramilitaries, and as such we had to advance with extreme caution. The area had been inaccessible until three years ago, due precisely to the presence of the FARC and of drug smugglers – these mountains were the location, in the 1980s, of “Tranquilandia”, Pablo Escobar’s city-cum-laboratory, which was later bombed by the army. The Americans, Dan and Brady, succeeded in making contact with the head of the Monochoa tribe, Rogelio, via a Colombian kayaker, Jules Domine, who is putting together a documentary on the area and in particular on the three large “chorros” (rapids) of the Rio Caquetà (Araracuara and Angostura) and the Rio Yarì (Gamitana). Flying towards Araracuara, we identified the area
The biologist Carlos Lasso talking with Marcelino, one of the wise men of the Monochoa community, within the large communal maloca hut
