ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the creation of the national park system in Colombia, part of a Latin American trend. Working within a political system that concentrated key decision-making powers in the person of the president, ambitious new environmental institutions, armed with new environmental guidelines, advocated the designation of protected areas. The chapter focuses on Tayrona National Park to explain park formation beyond mere designation. It also examines how, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, bitter struggles waged against settlers and tourist interests brought Colombia's most popular national park into existence. Colombian academics have emphasized the absence of the state in many corners of the national territory. The nature state is powerfully and pervasively manifest here in the forests that dominate the park, and this imposing vegetation, with all the creatures that inhabit it, constitute the clearest result of the environmental policy that has shaped this corner of the country.
