One Week by the Sea of Seven Colors: San Andrés, Colombia
Having arrived to Colombia a couple of weeks before I’d be starting work as a business development fellow at the startup social enterprise Agruppa, my boyfriend and I had some time to kill.
Our initial plan was to head to the coast for the world-famous Carnaval de Barranquilla — the timing was perfect, and who doesn’t love a good Carnaval? Unfortunately it turned out that we were far too late to book any reasonable accommodations, and neither luxury apartments nor dubious love motels were on our list of options. Barranquilla was a no-go.
So what could possibly compare to one of the biggest carnavales in the world?
I suppose a stunning Caribbean island would suffice.
San Andrés is a small coral island about 140 miles east of the coast of Nicaragua, forming the largest part of the three-island archipelago and Colombian department of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina. It is considered a national gem of the country, and any mention to a Colombian of your trip to San Andrés is sure to be met with a heartfelt “qué delicia!”
The history of San Andrés is a fascinating thread in the story of the colonial Caribbean. The story as first recorded by Europeans (though undoubtedly not the beginning of the story of the island itself) starts with the arrival of a handful of English Puritans in 1628, around the same time that the new Massachusetts Bay Colony was being established. Much like myself, these folks wondered why in the name of God anyone would attempt to sustain human life in such a freezing and inhospitable North American climate, and headed down to this fertile, tropical paradise instead.
The similarities between me and the Puritans end there, though, because they then proceeded to import enslaved people from other Caribbean islands, build a slave labor-based plantation economy of cotton and tobacco, and get themselves involved with the tough crowd of privateering, after which they would end up getting invaded by the Spanish and Henry Morgan consecutively. I did nothing of the sort; I just ate fried fish, laid on the beach, and went scuba diving.
From then on, San Andrés and its sister islands spent the next couple of centuries being tossed back and forth between Spain, pirates, the British, and Gran Colombia. Even the US tried to get its hands on this commercially strategic archipelago in the early 20th century, by requesting that it become part of Panama (where they thought that it might be a nice addition to their ownership over the new Canal). But despite Teddy Roosevelt’s heartwarming visit to the island, and a thoughtful follow-up visit by a nice US warship, the islanders, historically loyal to the Republic of Colombia, refused to join Panama or the US. By 1928 the archipelago was officially recognized as being exclusively under the sovereignty of Colombia.
Nowadays, San Andrés is very proudly Colombian, and there are no longer any pirates there (though you can visit a tourist trap called Morgan’s Cave, however it seems rather dubious as to whether this cave was actually frequented by Mr. Henry Morgan himself). The British influence on the island is quite noticeable, particularly in many of the English place names, and the architecture of the wooden houses, more reminiscent of Jamaica than of the Spanish colonial architecture of the hispanophone Caribbean.
Besides the diverse Spanish accents and boisterous Brazilian Portuguese that you’ll hear, there are three main languages spoken on the island: English, Spanish, and an English-derived Creole (considered a local dialect of Jamaican Patois that is specific to San Andrés and Providencia). Most of the folks from the island speak all three (similar to other politically Latin American / culturally Caribbean islands, like Roatán in Honduras). And if you were left with any doubts about the impressive cultural melting pot that is San Andrés, just take a listen to the music playing at any given street corner/store/car/business/cell phone — you’ll hear with equal frequency Colombian vallenatos, Jamaican dancehall, Top 40 reggaeton, Caribbean soca, reggae old and new, salsa, merengue, and everything in between.
One day during a surface break between dives, we were hanging out on the dock, watching some local fisherman gutting their catches from the morning and listening to them yelling in Creole to each other across their boats. With influences from various colonial languages including English and Spanish as well as West African roots, I am always enchanted by the way that this particular Anglo-Latin Creole seems to sound slightly, mysteriously familiar and yet simultaneously completely unintelligible to my ears.
One fisherman bent over and hauled a fat, four-plus foot kingfish out of his boat, to the admiration of his colleagues and to the fascination of a French Canadian woman on our dive crew. The size of the fish being quite impressive to us landlubbers, a shriek of “Oh my God!” erupted from her lungs.
The old, leathery skinned fisherman turned to look at her.
“That’s not your God,” he said in perfect English. “That’s a fish!”
We all laughed our asses off, and even the French Canadian woman managed a chuckle at herself.
Sun and sea were the stars of this trip. I was out to finish my open water scuba certification to keep up with my boyfriend, a former instructor, and we both had our eyes set on some very serious beach bumming time. What I didn’t expect was how face-to-face I’d come with the island’s history, both above and below the water.
During my total of seven dives, the view from my goggles was blessed with pufferfish, eels, barracuda, lionfish, more coral formations than I can name, and, to my simultaneous delight and terror, weird little wormies that stick their heads out of the sandy bottom and suck themselves back into the sand when you get close (which gave me terrible flashbacks of that creepy eyeball-on-a-stalk creature from the Star Wars garbage compactor scene that scarred me for life). But besides the spectacular natural ecosystem, there were few moments on the island when I wasn’t reminded of its history, acutely aware of hundreds of years of victory, tragedy, and the human experience.
Diving ship and airplane wrecks will do that to you.
The airplane had crashed over 20 years ago just 200m off the end of the runway, where it currently lies torn apart into several large pieces on the sandy ocean bottom. Parts of it are just barely recognizable as an airplane, but just knowing that the accident was destructive enough to tear a plane into pieces was enough to give me goosebumps under my wetsuit.
The Blue Diamond, on the other hand, is definitely recognizable as a ship. Though the history of its current home, resting peacefully on its side in just 12m (39ft) of water, is not quite as tragic as the misfortune of the airplane, knowing its story is nonetheless exhilarating: this 60m (197ft) freighter was seized by the Colombian government for drug running in the early 1990s, and was later sunk. As I nosed my way around the nooks and crannies of the ship, careful to avoid catching my gear on jagged metal and coral, I wondered about the people who had come before me, long before the ship had been appropriated by the flora and fauna of the sea. Laying my hands on nearly perfectly preserved cables, pipes, winches, pistons, and gears, I thought about the stories, motives, struggles, and victories that had once intertwined among these same parts.
Even above water, this tiny island offers endless subtle reminders that it is not just a tropical paradise that exists only in the vacuum of your Caribbean vacation. Sprawled on the beach with a cold beer in your hand, where it’s rather hard to think much about whatever your previous worries may have been, if you raise your view ever-so-slightly to the horizon, you’ll see that it’s dotted with dark shapes of varying sizes.
Long before tourism was even a thing, the Caribbean was not the stuff of airline promotions or Corona ads. It was a hotly contested basin of trade, politics, strategy, and, most of all, of highly unpredictable weather, disease, and uncharted physical territory. Coral reefs weren’t the highlight of an afternoon dive with your GoPro, but rather an invisible destroyer of ships and lives that tore through wooden hulls like butter.
Those shapes populating the horizon are skeletons — the bones of ships from throughout the ages, whose crews had the misfortune of not knowing the ring of coral that surrounds this little eight-mile-long blip in the sea.
Of course, I live in 2016, and I consider myself very lucky to have traveled to San Andrés via a modern airplane and without any significant concerns about contracting yellow fever or being boarded by pirates. Of course, one could also easily stick to the duty-free stores, the handful of pseudo-Italian restaurants, and the all-inclusive tours — a far cry from the stormy San Andrés of yesteryear. However, on an eight-mile-long island in the middle of the Caribbean, you’re never very far from the sea — nor, if you’re paying attention, from the endless stories swimming in its depths.
Rebecca Willett is a freelance writer, scuba diver, salsa dancer, and dog lover currently pursuing an MBA in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She firmly believes in learning something from everyone she meets, but if you try to tell her there is any ice cream superior to Argentinian dulce de leche ice cream, she will not hear you out.
An earlier version of this story was originally published on runrunrebecca.com.
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