Talk:Baja Guajira
More actions
Discussion for: Baja Guajira • View • Links • Related changes
Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Border
The border is the union of ten municipalities of southern La Guajira (OpenStreetMap relations: Albania 1314688, Barrancas 1314681, Distracción 1438571, El Molino 1314630, Fonseca 1314679, Hatonuevo 1314686, La Jagua del Pilar 1314684, San Juan del Cesar 1314629, Urumita 1314683, Villanueva 1314628), less the land inside the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Serranía del Perijá growing areas, which follow ground at or above 200 metres. What is left is the valley floor below 200 metres, about 1,400 km² in one piece. Pockets of low ground under 25 km² inside the two ranges are left out. The line is then smoothed: inlets and spurs narrower than about 1.3 km are filled or cut off, and the line is simplified to about 300 m. The Sierra Nevada and Perijá borders follow the smoothed line where they meet it, so the three areas meet edge to edge, and strips narrower than 3 km between this border and the Sierra Nevada's are closed. The point in the infobox is a point inside the border, not a field.
The municipal borders are today's. Hatonuevo was made a municipality in 1994 (confirmed in 1999), and Albania in 2000 from land of Fonseca and Maicao, so the municipalities of the 1970s were fewer and larger than those the border is drawn on.
Sources
- The area rests on Betancourt and García (1994), p. 54, who give the growing zones of the bonanza as a list of places "en la baja Guajira", together with the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The book calls them all municipalities, but several are villages or corregimientos. Placed with OpenStreetMap and Wikidata: the towns of Fonseca and Barrancas and the locality of Los Zanjones (Villanueva) stand on the valley floor; San Juan del Cesar, Villanueva, Urumita, El Totumo, Caracolí and San Antonio lie inside the Sierra Nevada or Perijá areas; Tomarrazón (a corregimiento of Riohacha) and Palomino (on the coast of Dibulla) lie outside every growing area. Cascajal is in neither OpenStreetMap nor Wikidata.
- On pp. 53–54 the same book says that farmers and ranchers "no sólo de la baja Guajira, sino también los del Cesar y Magdalena" gave their land to marijuana when the cotton crisis left it free. The area is drawn on the valley floor because the book names this farm and ranch land apart from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
- The five places the book names that are municipalities (San Juan del Cesar, Villanueva, Urumita, Fonseca and Barrancas) each have an appellation on the municipality's part of the valley floor. The other names on the list are places within municipalities and have no appellation.
- Albania is in the area although Betancourt and García do not name it. Its land was part of Maicao and Fonseca in the 1970s. It holds the herbarium gathering Fonnegra 1597 (13 March 1980), whose label HUA 54831 reads "Cultivado"; the label names the municipality as Maicao, and the herbarium's catalogue files it under Albania.
- Riohacha is not in the area. OpenStreetMap has no borders for its corregimientos, and the whole district below 200 metres would take in about 2,200 km² of coast and the city of Riohacha. Tomarrazón lies about 2 km outside the Sierra Nevada border.
- The status is Active. The Ministry of Defence's eradication dataset lists marijuana eradicated in nine of the ten municipalities: 42 rows, 18 September 2009 to 14 March 2019, 70.05 hectares, of which Barrancas has 22 rows and 44.55 hectares; Urumita has no rows (downloaded 20 October 2026). The dataset gives municipalities only, and each of the ten also reaches into the Sierra Nevada or the Perijá, so it does not say how much of the eradicated crop stood on the valley floor.
- None of these sources gives a year when growing began on the valley floor; the infobox leaves it blank.