Cerros de Mavecure
Interesting facts
- The rocks of the Guiana Shield beneath the hills are more than 1.7 billion years old, making Mavicure among the oldest mountains in Latin America.
- Geologists describe the rock as a deformed igneous rock with a porphyritic texture, often referred to simply as granite.
- Pajarito rises to about 712 metres and Mono to about 480 metres, while Mavicure itself is the smallest of the three.
- The Ramsar site around the hills, the Estrella Fluvial de Inírida, covers about 250,000 hectares where the Inírida, Guaviare, Atabapo and Ventuari converge toward the Orinoco.
- The wetland straddles two worlds: its flooded forests belong to the Amazon biome, while its black, white and clear waters are typical of the Orinoco.
- About 476 fish species have been recorded in these wetlands, roughly half of all fish species known from the Orinoco basin.
- The hills lie in El Remanso, a reserve of the Puinave people, who live in scattered villages along the Inírida basin.
Why it is worth it
Three dark domes of bare rock rise abruptly from the flat rainforest of eastern Colombia beside the Inírida River. Known as the Cerros de Mavicure (also spelled Mavecure), they look like islands stranded in a sea of trees, with nothing else in the flat landscape to break the horizon. The three are named Pajarito ("little bird"), Mono ("monkey") and Mavicure, Pajarito being the highest.
The hills are monoliths of very old crystalline rock, outliers of the Guiana Shield, the Precambrian basement that underlies much of north-eastern South America and also forms the tepuis and inselbergs of Venezuela and Guyana. Here the Inírida, a tributary in the Orinoco basin, winds past them through seasonally flooded forest and savanna, and the area around the hills was designated a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention in 2014. The summit of Pajarito has been reached only rarely, by climbing expeditions in 1992 and 2015.
The hills lie within a reserve of the Puinave people, and several indigenous groups of the area regard them as sacred. The name Mavicure is usually explained as referring to the blowgun used by hunters in the region. The three peaks appear on the coat of arms of Guainía Department and featured prominently in Ciro Guerra's film Embrace of the Serpent (2015), which brought their silhouette to an international audience; the governor of Guainía later honoured the director for showing them to the world.
Getting there
The Cerros de Mavicure stand on the Inírida River about 50 km south of the town of Inírida, capital of Guainía Department. Inírida is served by César Gaviria Trujillo Airport (PDA), about 44 km from the hills in a straight line. There is no road; the hills are reached by boat along the river, a trip of around two hours.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Cerros de Mavicuri are three hills, located in eastern Colombia, 50 km (31 mi) south of the city of Inírida on the Inírida River. Geologically, the mountains are part of the Guiana Shield.
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