Santander Department
Ben’s Place of the Week

Santander Department

Coordinates: 7 0 N 73 15 W

Area: 12,382 sq. mi. (32,069 sq. km)

With this year’s Nobel Prizes still in the headlines, the words of the 1937 winner in medicine, Albert von Szent-Györgyi, spring to mind. “Discovery,” he opined, “consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” If he was right, then the two scientists who ventured into deep into the jungle-covered slopes of the Yariguies range in Colombia’s east Andes should be commended for boldly going where no one had thought to before.

Their commitment to documenting bird diversity led them to the Santander Department, an administrative region that is at once isolated from the rest of the country and yet roughly 100 miles from Medellín, the second most populous city. News that Thomas Donegan and Blanca Huertas had discovered an unknown species of brush finch in Santander’s shrinking cloud forest was released this month.

Ben Keene is the editor of Oxford Atlas of the World. Check out some of his previous places of the week.