Magdalena River
— — the river that carries the country north.
Not only on a wall.
“Fifteen hundred kilometres from a páramo lake in the Macizo Colombiano down to the Caribbean at Barranquilla. The Magdalena holds most of the country's people along its banks, most of its history on its bends, and most of García Márquez's late prose in its current. The bocachico run up it every February; the herons stay all year.
Magdalena River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Magdalena is Colombia's principal river, running roughly 1,528 kilometres from a small lake in the Macizo Colombiano páramo of Huila department north through the inter-Andean valley between the country's central and eastern cordilleras, then out across the lowlands to the Caribbean at Bocas de Ceniza, just below Barranquilla. Its basin covers about 257,000 square kilometres — nearly a quarter of mainland Colombia — and holds more than thirty million people, including the cities of Neiva, Honda, Barrancabermeja, and Magangué. The river has been the country's central artery since pre-Columbian times and was named by Rodrigo de Bastidas on Saint Mary Magdalene's feast day in 1501.
The river carries one of the heaviest sediment loads of any river in South America, roughly 184 million tonnes a year, the colour shifting from clear Andean grey near its source to the chocolate brown that meets the Caribbean. Each February and March the bocachico fish run upstream to spawn — the subienda — drawing fishermen from every village along the middle course. The Mompós depression, where the river splits into the Brazo de Loba and the Brazo de Mompós around an old colonial island town, slows the current enough that the herons and capybaras outnumber the boats. The river freshens the Caribbean for kilometres past its mouth.
The Magdalena runs through two flood pulses a year. The first peak arrives in May with the rains on the central cordillera; the second, larger one comes in October and November and is what feeds the Mompós wetlands that hold migrant water birds through the northern winter. The dry stretch from December into March exposes sandbars along the middle course, and the subienda fish migration in February brings the river its busiest commercial weeks. The Honda fish market and the Mompós Holy Week processions both date their calendars from the river's level — work the bank when it falls, retreat when it rises.