The feeling is repeated when leaving Bogotá, Medellín and the main cities of Colombia.
Traveling around the country is an experience that defies the perception of distances.
If the maps promise 50, 100 or 150 kilometers, geography and roads quickly lower expectations: space ends up delaying time and most journeys, however brief they should be, become hours-long.
The Andes, the Caribbean, the jungle, the moors, the savannah.
Imagine a territory with an almost exclusively rural area that covers the perimeter of Spain and France.
But imagine also a country hit by a war that lasted half a century, in which institutions are still struggling to reach out and impose themselves in vast areas plagued by violence in the past.
About 90% of Colombia is countryside, which is synonymous with environmental wealth and biodiversity.
The perverse mechanism of the armed conflict with the FARC, however, added two more words to the equation: abandonment and insecurity.
Four years after the signing of the peace accords with the oldest guerrilla in America, today demobilized, the road to coexistence is not just a political debate.
It is made, above all, of concrete steps.
And this is how the remodeling of a highway, which has already begun to change the lives of thousands of people, is also part of the construction of a new country.
The New Belgium school.
The cacao route.Camilo Rozo / EPS
It is called Ruta del Cacao in homage to the cultivation of this product and the production of chocolate, one of the traditional activities of the department of Santander, in the northeast of Colombia.
But this 153-kilometer road that connects the cities of Bucaramanga, capital of the region, and Barrancabermeja, on the banks of the Magdalena River, aims to shorten distances to transform the local economy, create jobs and facilitate the supply chain in a corridor strategic for oil transportation.
The route, with a drop of about 900 meters, resembles an obstacle course that is already imaginary.
Until yesterday it was a journey through mountains, between ravines, rivers and detours next to the Sogamoso reservoir, the largest in the country.
Today it is a two-lane highway in each direction, partly already open to traffic, whose work is scheduled to be completed in 2021.
Ferrovial has been working on the project for years after winning the contract award in 2015. Since then, it first turned the Ruta del Cacao into a work within the work.
In order to work in a particularly rugged geographical environment, he built secondary roads.
He approached the peasant communities that until the last decade lived under the yoke of another guerrilla organization, the National Liberation Army (ELN), to involve them in the work.
It improved its communications and infrastructures.
It hired and trained more than 2,000 people from the region.
And since March 2020, the project continued, which involves an investment of 702 million euros, despite the enormous difficulties generated by the coronavirus pandemic and strict security protocols.
The aqueduct system of the people Portugal.
The plant and some of its beneficiaries Camilo Rozo / EPS
For Gabriel González, CEO of the company in Colombia, and his team it was like solving a puzzle.
Adapt to the territory, thanks to two tunnels of almost six kilometers and 34 bridges and viaducts, and involve the population.
“The highway provides much greater accessibility, which generates employment, wealth.
In the construction of the highway itself, we have had 2,800 workers, and that also produces a lot of dynamism in the region.
80% of the workforce is from here.
You have to get into the local fabric;
if not, this job would be impossible, and although we are a foreign company, they also feel us as locals ”, he explains.
Ferrovial has collaborated with community associations and NGOs so that the transformation proposed by the project benefits all those affected.
There is no settlement adjacent to the corridor, but there are in its area of influence.
That is why the company launched several parallel initiatives.
The 1,200 inhabitants of the Portuguese village have had access to drinking water since last year.
One of the most dangerous sections of the old highway began in the 1990s in this community due to incursions by armed groups and crossfire between the guerrillas and the Army.
The construction of an aqueduct, carried out with the support of Action Against Hunger, became a dream come true, said Amanda Garzón, head of the association created to manage the new water treatment system, on the opening day.
San SIlvestre Viaduct.
Cocoa RouteCamilo Rozo / EPS
"We involved university students in the work, schools have been built and now we want to make an effort so that community leaders are co-workers of the project," says Adriana Vargas Uribe, from the Sustainable Santander Network.
In mid-February, face-to-face classes began to resume in Colombia after a long interruption by covid-19.
And when conditions allow it, the children of the town of El Tapazón will also return to school, where Ferrovial built a school, called Nueva Belgium, with two classrooms, a library, a sports court and a park.
The remodeling of the Ruta del Cacao is a feat of engineering, but at the same time it is a part of the reconstruction of the region.
For this Gabriel González explains that he had to use a multidisciplinary team.
"We have here engineers, social personnel, environmental personnel, biologists, many professions, and they have to add all of them in the same direction."
The company also supported, through organizations such as the Red Cross, integration projects for Venezuelan migrants, who often arrive in the department of Santander on foot.
The roads of Colombia, where around 1.7 million refugees live, have been strewn for years by entire families who have left their country and seem to wander aimlessly.
Bucaramanga is located about 200 kilometers from the border.
To get there, thousands of people cross the Berlin moor, at more than 3,000 meters and enduring freezing temperatures.
And that city and its surroundings, a time cradle of violence, today represent a second chance for many Venezuelans.
The aqueduct system of the people Portugal.
The plant and some of its beneficiaries Camilo Rozo / EPS
"To work in Colombia you have to understand the country, the culture and the accessibility problems to the territory, especially in a work of these characteristics that has tunnels, viaducts and involves large-scale earth movements," continues González.
The work of the Ruta del Cacao, which at the beginning of March received the visit of the vice president, Marta Lucía Ramírez, is 70% complete and is already a social glue.
“We have been in a place where the National Liberation Army was present until a few years ago,” González recalls, referring to that guerrilla group, which has not yet demobilized but has left that territory.
"The peace process with the FARC has also been noticed and today these peasants earn their living working with their fields and their activities, and the accessibility that the road gives them will bring much more progress and development," he predicts.
Former President Juan Manuel Santos, the main promoter of the peace accords, left office in August 2018 precisely speaking of works and roads.
"If there is something that by its own weight is evident and should be continued, it is this infrastructure revolution, which is unstoppable, just as peace is irreversible," he said.
The two ideas actually go hand in hand.
Peace allowed Colombia to emerge from a decades-long blockade and begin to rediscover itself, but infrastructure and communications are a necessary step to turn the page.
And thus embark on a new path.