Putumayo Department

A solo traveller may want privacy and independence while still having company easy to find.

In Colombia's Putumayo region, members of the Guardianas del Agua network are adding digital maps to their environmental work.

An ongoing 2026 partnership is helping women document water sources, biodiversity and threats to the places they know.

Training pairs field observations with open mapping tools, including ways to record location-based information through familiar messaging platforms.

Y mira, miren que hay una grabación de un testigo, muy rápido.

Se las vamos a poner un fragmento chiquito, eh, de un testigo que fue un soldado que nos llamó y nos contó que en una zona llamada el Putumayo, que tiene frontera con Perú, eh, iba caminando y vio una extraña esfera de luz que se fue hacia el aire y que incluso lo asustó tanto que le disparó y se fue.

Ya, es todo.

Escuchen un segundo.

So in other words, you explore the connection between art, political ecology, human-plant relationship, and new media.

So, Borrachero Dreams transports an autochthonous man from Putumayo, the Colombian Amazon, to the Swiss Alps through the hallucination inducement of the Brugmansia plant.

How did this story come about? What is interesting in bringing these two very different landscapes together?

Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me and giving this space to share more about the film.

And he really worked mostly through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and then died very young at 50, I think not quite 56 in 2000.

But the book concerns a trip he took to the Colombian Amazon in 1971. a community called La Torera, which is in the Putumayo area of southern Colombia near the border with Peru.

And he and his brother and some friends went there looking for an indigenous, a kind of obscure indigenous hallucinogen called ukuhay plant, really just a flowering shrub that they had read about and a leaflet really from the Harvard Herbaria.

And they were kind of, you know, psychonauts.

Those are really the far and away the most important things.

you know, for lack of a better word, drugs in the Indigenous experience.

And, you know, I'm generalizing, but that's certainly true in the Putumayo, and I think more broadly true in the Amazon Basin.

When you think about the book, how it explores also meaning, was something that you appreciate from your own experience that you hope readers will also experience when it comes to learning from others and their experiences?

[upbeat music] And here's what you need to know this morning.

Copper Giant Resources has reported a major resource expansion at the Macoa copper molybdenum gold porphyry deposit in Putumayo, Colombia, with a total inferred resource now sitting at one point six billion tons for nine point three six billion pounds of copper and two hundred and ninety million tons upgraded to the indicated category for two point one three billion pounds of copper.

A PEA for Macoa is planned using these numbers for Q4 of this year.

Copper Giant Resources trades on the Venture Exchange with CGNT.

Sí

...el juez tenía razón, creo que en estas dos decisiones, eh, eh, estos jueces de Putumayo-

Sí

...tenían razón en suspender ese, ese supuesto, eh, que, que-- los, los-

Ese plan piloto que había-

Ese supuesto plan piloto, pero era un plan piloto sobre mil hectáreas.

En Putumayo.

En Putumayo.

Sure, yeah.

So Terence, uh, 1971, Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis and a, a crew of friends traveled to a remote Colombian village called La Chorrera, um, in the Putumayo area of southern Colombia.

Uh, the Putumayo is a, a tributary of the Amazon, um, and, uh, and forms the border between c- uh, you know, Colombia and Peru.

Um, and they went looking for an obscure indigenous hallucin- hallucinogen called ukuye.

Uh, Dennis had f- just stumbled upon a, um- A kind of leaflet from the, at the, by a famous Harvard ethnobotanist named Richard Evans Schultes.

Um, there's a whole range of them.

Some of them contain DMT, some of them don't.

But this one particular one was u- supposedly used by indigenous people, uh, of the Putumayo in the region of La Chorrera.