Under the Burning Sun and Pouring Rain. Foreign Travellers and the Colombian Weather Throughout the Nineteenth-century

Abstract

After independence, and throughout the Nineteenth-century, many foreign travelers arrived in Colombia and published their travel accounts. The experience for the mid-latitude travelers, in the lowlands of a tropical country, was almost a nightmare. Their descriptions highlighted the unbearable heat, the humidity, the mosquitoes, the diseases, and “the laziness” of the inhabitants of this kind of environment. Their perception was changing while they climbed the Andes and found places where the temperature decreased. Then, they felt in a kind of an “eternal spring” or a “perpetual autumn”. This paper displays a reconstruction of foreign perception on climate and weather and, relevant records to the study of Climate History in Colombia.