Gaviotas, Colombia

Nov 12, 2013
Laurie Guevara-​Stone


The plains of eastern Colombia are a tough land—the haunt of drug trafficking, guerilla warfare, and paramilitary groups; a place where the soil is so poor everyone said nothing could grow. Paolo Lugari, the founder of the 200-person community of Gaviotas, believed otherwise. In the face of adversity, he built a thriving, self-sustaining community.

Forty years ago, Lugari visited this bleak, barren land, written off by agronomists as the equivalent of a tropical desert, and decided he would make a community that would be not only habitable, but also prolific and sustainable.

Lugari brought a group of engineers, dreamers, street kids, and local Guahibo Indians together to come up with technologies to help them live sustainably in this desolate area of Colombia. And through trial and error, they succeeded. They manufacture their own solar hot water collectors, windmills, and an efficient water pump called a “sleeve pump.” They produce all their own electricity and food, and earn an income through sale of their renewable energy technologies, sustainable forest products, and pure water.

When asked how they achieved what some deemed impossible, Lugari says he approaches every challenge without any fixed ideas, and their philosophy of AVV, alli vamos viendo, which loosely translates into “just see what happens.”

Homegrown Renewable Technologies

Gaviotans manufactured solar hot water panels to produce hot water for the hospital in the community. Over the years they improved the design so the collectors are now extremely efficient, and bring hot water to people in the city, even in overcast, cloudy weather. Currently, more than 31,000 of the solar hot water collectors are in use throughout Colombia, including in Bogotá, a great example of technology being transferred from the rural areas to the city.

Every house in Gaviotas gets its electricity from the low-head micro-hydro plant, which produces between 15 and 20 kilowatts, with a one-meter drop. This is plenty of electricity for the low energy use of rural Colombian homes. Gaviotan-produced biodiesel runs all of the engines in the community, which in this carless community means tractors, work trucks, and electric generators.

They also discovered pure water only 40 meters below their soil. They decided to take advantage of this by developing a water bottling plant, in recognition of a high rate gastrointestinal illness in the area from drinking water of poor quality. Needing to pump water from a depth of over 120 feet, they took ideas from Holland, Australia, Africa, and NASA, and designed a windmill that pumps thousands of gallons per day, even at a wind speed of under four mph. The windmills pump the water from the underground aquifer into a storage tank, where it is gravity fed to a bottling plant, and distributed free to local residents, in hopes of lowering the rate of gastrointestinal diseases.


Bioclimatic Architecture

The Gaviotas philosophy of being as self-sufficient as possible and not using imported technology keeps solar PV mainly out of the picture, and the majority of the bottling plant is run on biodiesel and micro-hydro electricity. But some of the labs necessary to analyze the water run their equipment from a three kW PV system. To keep the plant cool, ventilation ducts run underground, capturing the wind from the northwest, and drawing it through the plant, where the air naturally vents out of the double-plated self-cooling roof. The roof is made of two sheets of corrugated metal, bonded together to create honey-combed air chambers.


Other buildings in Gaviotas showcase innovative architectural features as well. The multipurpose hall, which serves as the meeting place, church, conference center, and game room, sports a roof in the shape of a parabola, designed so that no matter where the sun’s rays are throughout the day, they are reflected off the roof, keeping the interior cooler than the humid, suffocating heat of the savannah. The walls of the hall, as with all the buildings in Gaviotas, are built out of brick-sized pressed blocks made from a mixture of native soil and a small amount of cement. These are hand-made in Gaviotas with a CINVA press, a manual press developed in Colombia and first tested in the community of Gaviotas. The thermal mass of the pressed blocks also aids in keeping the interior of the buildings and homes cool.

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I should probably ask which wingnut blog you got that from, but I'm really not interested.