Aguapanela

Every city has a flavour. Returning to a familiar city is like visiting your grandparents as a kid. There’s a certain indescribable smell that becomes more familiar and distinct each time you visit. In Medellin, Colombia’s second largest city, the smell is more an overwhelming sensation. From a distance it is a city of red bricks climbing defiantly up the steep green walls of a long valley. A northerly mountain breeze cools the city and blows away the black smoke belched by colourful, noisy buses, leaving it bright and clear. Flowers are everywhere. So are music, fruit, and men and women selling something – anything – on the city streets.

A mathematical genius collects tomato crates to sell at the local market

My wife is from this city that is known in Colombia as the place of eternal spring, and infamous elsewhere as the once home of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel. I lived here for 18 months. After two years away, everything says, smells, feels and sounds Medellin: distinct and familiar. The carved shapes of wooden window panes, the texture of slippery terracotta tiles, local expressions, honking horns and screeching brakes, thick tangles of electricity cables within reach of second-story red-brick homes; close enough to hang clothes to dry.

The evening after arriving we visit friends high on the city’s eastern valley wall. We pass kids playing football on streets so steep the local diesel buses struggle to climb them in first gear. One team gloats a considerable gravitational advantage, and the goalkeeper on the downward side has added motivation. If he lets a goal through the walk down to collect the ball is a healthy hike. Behind the buses kids on bikes tow a ride up the hill with a short length of rope. Nothing, it seems, has changed.

Until we arrive at our friends’ perpetually nearly-constructed home. There’s a little more roof than two years ago. Whenever the family saves a little money, they make a fire on the street and cook a big stew called sancocho – three meats, potatoes, yuccas, plantain – for local friends who come to help build the house. But the extra section of roof is not what’s changed. A few additional roof tiles do not alter the city’s flavour.

It’s the custom in every Colombian home to offer something to guests. Traditionally the something is aguapanela, water boiled with pure blocks of condensed sugarcane juice, panela. The aguapanela is usually heated and served with coffee or drinking chocolate, or served cold with lemon juice, depending on the time of day, and a pot of it has long been a permanent fixture on the stove of every Colombian home.

A Young girl plays with freshly cooked panela before it hardens

On this occasion, however, we are offered glasses of coca cola. My wife and I look at each other in bewildered shock, and in half-gest we protest that we haven’t come umpteen thousand kilometres to be served something as atypical and ubiquitous as coke.

But a litre of coke, we are told, has become cheaper than aguapanela. The next day, we discover why.



The bus to Altamira leaves at 7:30 in the morning. It’s a four-hour trip up, down, over and around fertile mountains cloaked in cloud. A thousand shades of vegetation paint the landscape. The overall effect is a world of green.

The view from Altamira

Altamira is a small town in Colombia’s coffee region. It’s an obscure little dot on the map, rarely visited by anybody who doesn’t live there, but my wife’s family has many friends there with small plots of land, and it’s these parcels of land strewn around the town that are our destination, rather than the town itself, which, for security reasons, I never actually see.

Altamira is part of Colombia’s ‘red zone.’ Ongoing guerrilla activity has resulted in heavy militarisation of the town. Police and soldiers oversee foot-traffic, and, because of nearby guerrilla activity, strangers are treated with suspicion. In 2001 three Irish tourists were detained after travelling in a red zone. They were agents of the IRA, the army announced, training Colombian rebels in urban warfare techniques. Their capture was hailed as another ‘success’ in the war against terror. Over a year later, the trio were finally repatriated and cleared of all terrorist related charges. There have been precedents of foreigners aiding guerrilla insurgency groups, however, so we decide it’s best to avoid suspicious authorities.

The bus drops us a few kilometres below the town at a friend’s home. It is the same family who we had visited the evening before. Three sisters of one family married three brothers of another. The family tree is more labyrinthine than One Hundred Years of Solitude. Garcia Márquez’s books are more real than magic.

Across the narrow dirt road, Jesus, a brother of the three sisters, is making panela in the small distillery he founded five years ago. It is a big open-air shed with a high roof and clay floor.

Earlier in the morning he has cut, with his brother and two friends, enough cane from his adjacent crop to make a month’s worth of panela for the local families, around 100kg. The cane is crushed in a fuel driven machine with a big belt that drives a series of cogs (in many places the cogs are still powered by mule or running water). The juice is collected in a big barrel before running via a tube into the first of five large vats. There the juice is heated over a cavernous cane-fuelled oven and passed from one vat to the next. The bitter froth is skimmed from the bubbling surface until the juice finally evaporates into a thick molasses in the final vat. It is then put to cool in smaller quantities and poured over one-pound moulds.

Until recently, Jesus operated his panela distillery throughout most of the year. He saved for years to establish it, often working in much larger industrial distilleries. Because the process of making panela must be done in one go, from juicing the cane through to drying the final product, he commonly worked 20-hour shifts, earning less than 50 cents an hour. “The only way to get through a shift like that,” he says, “is drink a lot of cane juice.” He also sold the little livestock he had – a few pigs – and replaced his coffee and bean crops with sugarcane.

However, since a new hygiene law was passed last year, he only operates the distillery once a month to make panela for local families. He trades it for beans, eggs, roots, plantains, papaya and other local produce. Jesus is no longer allowed to sell his panela, and he is broke.

“The government wants me to seal off the entire distillery and buy stainless steel benches and instruments,” he says. “That would cost millions of pesos. I’ve never seen that much money.”

While we talk one of his friends sweeps the clay floor. It’s a simple place, but it is kept with dignity. Three years before I visited a poor, displaced woman in her improvised one-room home in Medellin. She too swept the earth floor while we spoke. “There’s no need to let dust settle on dust,” she said with a smile.

On the surface, the modernisation of industry is a good thing. But the motives behind the new hygiene law are shady, and result in the monopolisation of a staple industry. The big end of town that mass-produces sugar derived products from thousand-hectare cane farms makes more money, while small-scale producers go broke, and the average Colombian family must economise their use of panela. In the last year, the price of panela has nearly doubled, increasing by more than 50c a kilogram. Given that two thirds of Colombians live on less than two dollars a day, that’s a big increase.

The booming ethanol industry is also a factor behind the new law and the subsequent monopolisation, says Jesus. White sugar and ethanol are more profitable than panela, which is a more pure product. “The big producers don’t want people to buy panela anymore,” says Jesus.

In the afternoon we walk for an hour along muddy mountain tracks to stay with two close friends of the family, Mariano and his wife Eumelia. My father in-law worked here in the 1970s as an agricultural engineer, and has returned frequently ever since. My wife spent much of her childhood climbing mango and orange trees with Eumelia and Mariano’s 13 children. Eumelia is now 62, has five great-grandkids, and more energy than a pound of panela.

Eumelia, 62, mother of 13, great-granma to five, walks along a mountain track to visit her son.

Their home is a beautiful, incongruent mix of modernity and tradition. Eumelia cooks on a clay oven. The ceiling is low and suspended by walls made of a mix of cow manure, mud and lime compacted over cane. A web of electricity cables climbs the mountains and powers the electric lights and a fuzzy little television with a bicycle rim for antenna. The shower is a bucket.

Eumelia tells me that when all the family lived at home she boiled two pounds of panela each day in a big pot. Mariano starts the day with a tinto at dawn, a sweet black coffee made with aguapanela, and takes a flask of energy water with him to work in the fields.

He invites me to work with him digging holes to plant coffee saplings. The terrain is steep, and it’s hard work. The productivity of his small plot of land, about a hectare, is awesome. On the ground beneath the coffee plants are bean vines, and above us plantain and banana trees shade the crops with their massive leaves. The area is so fertile that even the electricity cables have small succulents growing from them.

Before climbing back up to the house for a 9am breakfast, we collect some beans. A few square metres of terrain provide enough bean pods for several large meals.

Christian, Eumelia's grandson, plays with a hoop (future TV antenna) along a mountain track

And what meals!! Normally beans are bought dry and are soaked overnight. But Eumelia cooks us fresh beans with plantain and a green leafy vegetable called coles. They are served with rice, avocadoes picked from nearby trees, and fried ripe plantain. Mmm!!

And writing anything more after such a scrumptious gastronomical conclusion can only lead to an anticlimax, so I’ll leave it there.