From mining corridor to corridor of life

Traveling through the Sabanas de Ibirico and climbing the Serranía del Perijá during the VI TRAJECTS LATAM Mobile School was much more than a field trip to get to know the former mining corridor of Cesar, located between the townships of La Loma and Estados Unidos. Over four days, the territory became a space for encounter and learning for the school's participants. Walking alongside the river, observing the changes in the landscape, listening to the stories of those who have lived through the transformations tied to mining, as well as learning about community tourism initiatives and productive alternatives, allowed us to approach Cesar from multiple perspectives and understand why its inhabitants now insist on calling this area the Corridor of Life.

Professionals from different disciplines affiliated with universities in Colombia and Norway, people from local organizations, and former coal mine workers shared knowledge and experiences, blurring the lines between those who came to teach and those who came to learn. As Jeraldyn, one of the fellows from Universidad Nacional de Colombia, put it: "although many of us had the chance to contribute our own knowledge, the truth is that we were mainly learners, since we were surrounded by people who are experts in their own processes."

This experience allowed us to see, in a different light, a territory whose recent history has been deeply shaped by coal extraction. From the areas affected by mining to the landscapes of the Serranía, the journeys made visible both the scale and persistence of these transformations and the alternatives communities are building today. In the reflections that emerged from what was shared, community tourism repeatedly came up as a possibility for diversifying the economy while also recognizing other values of the territory, its ecosystems, culture, knowledge, and memories. Andrys, a Wayuu fellow from Universidad del Magdalena, summed up this feeling when describing the experience from the top of the Perijá: "This territory teaches us that community also builds academic knowledge, and that La Jagua is much more than coal mining, it's a land with enormous potential for scientific, ecological, and cultural tourism."

The Mobile School also left us with several open questions. Conversations among participants highlighted that building a just transition doesn't simply mean replacing mining with a new economic activity, since even alternatives considered more sustainable can produce significant impacts on who actually benefits, when they fail to generate fully decent working conditions. In this sense, concerns about how to ensure decent work or how to prevent new activities from reproducing old forms of dependency emerged as reflections to keep exploring from academia and from institutions. As Mariana, a fellow from UniMagdalena, put it, "a just transition doesn't consist only of replacing one energy source with another, but also of creating sustainable and territorially relevant productive alternatives that contribute to community wellbeing and reduce their dependence on extractive economies."

Rather than offering definitive answers, the Mobile School left behind shared experiences of observation, listening, and reflection on the social relationships and the shaping of the landscapes we inhabit, in relation to livelihoods, whether imposed or chosen, and decisions about the future. Getting to know the territory by walking through it, and talking with those who are imagining and building their future in Cesar, made it possible to understand the just transition as a necessary process for sustaining life in the region. A process in which biocultural memory, as a heritage of the relationship between nature and culture, holds a central place, since it "proposes alternative ways of producing, circulating, transforming, and consuming the food and other raw materials required by society" (Víctor M. Toledo, 2012).

Perhaps one of the main lessons of the 2026 Mobile School was precisely that every territorial transformation needs to begin with listening, with recognizing what the territory, its landscapes, its memories, and above all, the people who inhabit it, have to teach us about the futures that can be built.

TRAJECTS LATAM extends special thanks to Universidad del Magdalena and its energy transition research group, led by professor Andrea Cardoso, for selecting Aquatours as the logistics operator for the VI Mobile School, through which the TRAJECTS and NORCOL partnerships had the opportunity to share this joint exchange experience between academia and local knowledge holders, as well as between perspectives from the Global North and South. The community tourism routes visited during the school were designed participatorily as part of the project "Community Tourism for a Just Transition: A Participatory Proposal Guided by Plural Values in the Corridor of Life in Cesar, the Case of La Jagua de Ibirico," research funded by the Orquídeas program of Colombia's Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation.