👁️🗨️ Storying Place
Activities
Storying Guayabillas
In May 2024, a three-day onboarding in Guayabillas blended participatory codesign with technical and narrative grounding. Using the Story of Place™ sequence, facilitators led storytelling, mapping, and dialogue: tracing flows such as water, wildlife, and forest corridors; reviewing land-use history and migration; naming values and priorities; and agreeing what “regeneration” should mean locally. That shared story became the reference for the DAO’s purpose, funding rules, and project priorities.
Oral History Collection and Memory Mapping
In trawün (community meetings), elders remembered when *pitrales* and *gualves*, *canelos* and *lumas* dominated the land—recorded in this account—along with stories of change, place, and legends such as the Girl of the Radales, who appears to those who walk the radal groves. Memory work recorded sharp losses: puma, skunk, monito del monte, burrowing owl, and other beings elders knew from lived experience. Legendary fires turned routine; crops sometimes burned before harvest while families fought only to save houses. As one elder observed: “Before, the puma could be found in any sector, because there was more forest and houses were far apart... we were living in a space where we coexisted with wildlife” (elder testimony). That reality had changed sharply, calling for a coordinated response. The project also built a documentary archive of territorial memory and linked youth to ancestors. Naming dozens of plants, animals, and relations, the community still carries biocultural depth that can ground regeneration.
The Living Atlas
Bosque Fractal is developing a "Living Atlas"—a dynamic, participatory tool that maps the ecological, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of the territory. This atlas weaves together watershed maps, sacred sites, historical memory, and narrative layers contributed by elders, artists, and local stewards. The Living Atlas blends digital and analog tools to map bioregional regeneration, capturing both data and the intangible stories of land and people. It serves both as a guide for ecological restoration (what to plant, where to protect, how to read the landscape) and as an educational and ceremonial resource. The vision extends beyond Colombia. Bosque Fractal is connected to a network of sacred peace temples across the globe—in the Gulf of Maine, Scotland, Wales, and beyond—through the Living Atlas for Bioregional Regeneration. This atlas uses sacred geometry and multiple knowledge traditions to connect bioregions and share practices for peace and ecological healing.
Story of Place
To understand the boundaries and character of their bioregion, the BLC undertook a Story of Place process, creating a layered analysis starting from geology, examining landscape and land use, rainfall patterns and soil types, but also human social history and political history. This process sought to understand how human culture has been shaped by the natural characteristics of the region.