Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

Rising from Colombia's Caribbean coast to snowcapped peaks above 5,700 meters, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the world's highest coastal mountain range and is one of the most important place on Earth for endemic species. Re:wild and Indigenous communities are protecting it.

Support Conservation in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

The Heart of the World

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta rises from Colombia's Caribbean coast through dry and montane forests, páramo, and snowcapped peaks above 5,700 meters.

Its dramatic range of elevation has driven the evolution of an extraordinary diversity of life found nowhere else. Seventeen amphibian species are endemic to the SNSM, including five species of Harlequin Toads. Around 70 bird species exist only here. Jaguars, peccaries, tapirs, and howler monkeys move through its forests.

Four Indigenous communities, the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo, call the SNSM their home and consider it the "Heart of the World". They have been its stewards for generations, and they are central to any conservation effort that actually works here.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta provides clean water to more than a million Colombians. It is also being squeezed from every side.

Agriculture, logging, road construction, unsustainable tourism, and oil and coal mining are all pressing in on the SNSM's edges. The mountain's watersheds supply drinking water to a million people in its foothills. The forests store vast quantities of carbon. The stakes of failing to protect this place extend well beyond the mountain itself.

Recovering ancestral territories

As agriculture, logging, road construction, unsustainable tourism, oil and coal mining, and infrastructure development put the SNSM and all of the people and wildlife that depend on it at risk, Re:wild is working with a number of partners to ensure the protection of the SNSM. Re:wild is helping by implementing the co-management plan established in 2020 between Colombia’s National Parks Authority and the Indigenous peoples living here.

This includes supporting Indigenous communities in their efforts to protect and manage their territories, which also provide critical habitat to countless species. This also helps recover their ancestral territories, strengthen their traditional governance structures and knowledge systems, and implement sustainable land-use systems that minimize land-tenure conflicts with their neighbors.

Protecting Harlequin Toads

Unlike Harlequin Toads across much of the Neotropics, which have suffered catastrophic declines from a deadly fungal pathogen, the toads of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are thriving. Re:wild works with Fundación Atelopus, the Arhuaco Indigenous community, and local farmholders to monitor populations and develop community-based solutions to protect them and the watershed habitats they depend on.

The Starry Night Harlequin Toad, not recorded by science since 1991, was rediscovered when the Arhuaco people of the Sogrome community helped Fundación Atelopus document it for the first time in more than 30 years.