Story
Dora Alicia Londoño came to the Anchicayá canyon looking for somewhere to stay. What she found was a living made from the birds she looks after.
The film
Carlos Mario Wagner, who founded Colombia BirdFair and backed the project early on, filmed this short in 2019. Three and a half minutes of Dora telling it herself.
1998
Dora Alicia Londoño was born in Sevilla, Valle del Cauca, and grew up in the Eastern Plains in the middle of the war. After that she kept moving: Cajamarca in Tolima, the Plains again, the hamlet of Bolo Azul, then El Queremal. Displaced each time.
In 1998 she reached the Anchicayá canyon, between Dagua and Buenaventura, and this time she stayed. Of the canyon she says she feels «free in this place».
The house
It started as a plastic shack at the side of the road. Then she rebuilt it in bahareque, the local wattle and daub. Then in mud. The farm ended up named El Descanso — the rest, the break — which is exactly what you are after at kilometre 55 of a mountain road.
The trucks came down that road to the port of Buenaventura, and she cooked for the drivers: set lunch, coffee, empanadas. Food for whoever was passing through.
2010
There is a ficus tree in the yard that fills with birds when it fruits. The people stopping for lunch noticed before anyone else, and on their advice, in 2010, Dora set out a board of plantains beside the road.
The fruit brought the tanagers, the toucanets and the barbet, and the birds brought photographers, biologists and birders from other countries. The board became a real set of feeders.
The family
Dora does not run this alone: there is don Luis, her husband, and the children and grandchildren — Elber, Heiler, Daniela, Sofía, Heidi. Elber, who also photographs birds, painted the murals that cover the walls of the house. The Toucan Barbet beside the kitchen is the one everybody photographs.
With what birding tourism brought in, the house grew in stages: the feeders and the corridor first, then rooms for the people who wanted to wake up there, and finally the terrace, level with the ficus canopy. Colombia Birdfair, and Carlos Mario Wagner in particular, pushed the project along early on.
Today
«Doña Dora» is now a fixed stop on Valle del Cauca birding itineraries, alongside Km 18 and La Florida. On eBird the site is listed as «Alto Anchicayá - El Descanso (Doña Dora)», and visitors have left it at 4.8 stars with over 300 reviews on Google.
The house itself has not changed: eight beds, a garden out back and a long table where everyone has breakfast at the same time. What changed is who sits at that table — people now come from the United States, Europe and Asia, with long lenses, for a bird that does not occur where they live.
«The kindness of the people looking after you, the seasoning in their cooking and above all how close you get to the birds that come to this place.»
Putting fruit out every day also meant looking after the forest the birds come from, and with it the insects and flowers of the canyon. Lehmann's poison frog, Oophaga lehmanni, endemic and critically endangered, lives in this same basin, and local people work to stop it being taken.
The book
The full story was written by Elber Sánchez Londoño, Dora's son, and published by Ensifera. One hundred and sixty pages told from the inside: the house at the side of the road to the Pacific, and the persistence and community work that turned it into one of the most important birding sites in the country. In Spanish.
Where to find itThe house is open every day, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.