For Ronald Fuenmayor, a young Wayuu from the coastal territory of Paraguachón in northern Colombia, dreams are an inseparable part of his spiritual relationship with nature.
“Dreams announce things that might happen to your family or those close to you,” he recounts.
In the Wayuu worldview, dreams are in dialogue with the territory. The sea, plants, wind, or rain warn of illnesses, visitors, losses or climate shifts.
“When the sun has a large halo, it announces illness,” Fuenmayor explains. He recalls how certain birds herald the arrival of a visitor or a death, and how intensely orange sunsets are interpreted as signs of grave events in the territory.
This knowledge has historically been passed down by grandparents and spiritual authorities.
However, the climate crisis has altered these readings, Fuenmayor says. The territory the 30-year-old knew in his childhood is no longer the same. Droughts are longer, rains more unpredictable, and the sea has changed its behaviour. And the signs one reads in dreams are losing their clarity.
Studies demonstrate that the climate crisis has modified historical environmental patterns, making rainy seasons unpredictable and affecting agriculture and community survival. It is also profoundly impacting Wayuu culture.
Great uncertainty
This transformation directly affects agriculture and the communities’ ways of life. In many Wayuu communities, seed sowing has become a risk. Families prepare the land, investing seeds, time, and collective labour, but the rain no longer responds as it once did.
“Sometimes it rains for a single day and then never rains again. The seed, the work, and the hectares sown are lost,” Fuenmayor tells Dialogue Earth.
The elders, who could once interpret the weather by observing the moon, the clouds or the wind, now feel uncertainty. Fuenmayor says his father clings to his crops, though he recognises that “it is no longer like before”. Currently, the risk of losing a harvest is much higher than the chances of making a profit.
Water scarcity is another major concern. Obtaining water to supply homes, animals and crops involves travelling long distances. The jagüey – traditional handcrafted wells – are fundamental for community survival, though many dry up quickly due to extreme heat and the lack of constant rain.
“Everything changes depending on whether there is water or not,” says Fuenmayor. The impact is not only material; the absence of water affects the collective mood and spirituality. “It afflicts mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers; it afflicts the spirit,” he says with sorrow.
Within Wayuu spirituality, the rain has its own name: Juya. Its arrival represents abundance, well-being and the renewal of life. When Juya visits the territory, “there is a party, there is a meeting; the spirit is happy”, Fuenmayor says. But when the rain does not come, the community interprets it as an imbalance between the people and the land.
The UN has warned that climate change alters precipitation patterns and accelerates both droughts and water scarcity in vulnerable territories. This phenomenon coincides with what Fuenmayor describes when speaking of unpredictable rains, loss of seeds and longer dry seasons.
Reading the climate is also linked to the Wayuu calendar. Unlike the Western calendar, the most important cycle begins with juyapu, the great rainy season between August and November. Its presence marks the start of a new cycle of abundance: sowing, fishing, hunting and community activities.
Beyond climate change, coastal communities face another growing problem: coastal erosion. Fuenmayor reports that in Caño Zagua, a Wayuu settlement on the northern peninsula of La Guajira, several homes have disappeared due to the advancing sea and the alteration of natural channels following human interventions years ago. “There are homes that collapsed, and others are cracking,” he points out. According to community counts, at least five houses have already vanished.
Amidst a global climate crisis, the experience of the Wayuu people reveals that climate change does not only affect weather patterns – it transforms ways of feeling, interpreting, and inhabiting the world. Where dreams once announced the arrival of rain, uncertainty now reigns.
In search of solutions
Yet the memory of the elders persists, attempting to keep alive an ancestral reading of the territory that still has much to teach.
In Wayuunaiki, the language of the Wayuu, there are no exact words for “rubbish” or “recycling”. The explanation lies in the ancestral practices of Wayuu grandmothers.
“Everything had a use within the territory,” explains Yenilin Lubo Bonivento, a young Wayuu woman. Fabrics were reused to make new items; tins were turned into household utensils; maize and cassava husks served as animal feed or compost for the land.
At talking circles attended by Lubo Bonivento, older women recalled how families once moved according to the rainy seasons and how knowledge of the climate allowed them to care for animals, sow crops and preserve seeds resistant to desert conditions. “We realised that we had already experienced the effects of climate change in the past, even though we didn’t call it that,” explains Lubo Bonivento. “The difference is that in the past, the seasons were more predictable.”
The diversity of our seeds also reflects the cultural and biological richness of our territoryYenilin Lubo Bonivento, a young Wayuu woman
It was there that two concerns began to connect: the loss of ancestral knowledge of the land and the disappearance of traditional seeds. Many older people noted that younger generations no longer recognised various wild species or knew when to harvest or sow them. “Our seeds are the foundation of our food, medicine and spirituality,” says Lubo Bonivento. “The diversity of our seeds also reflects the cultural and biological richness of our territory.”
Tekia is another settlement in La Guajira. In 2024, its community began compiling oral histories of native seeds and sowing techniques from community elders. The result was the creation of an ecological and spiritual calendar documenting rainy seasons, harvest times, climatic signs, lunar cycles and seed-gathering periods.
Building on this experience, the community began creating a nursery and community seed bank for native seeds historically adapted to the arid conditions of La Guajira. The initiative involves women, children, young people and the elderly in training programmes for the collection, storage and conservation of their own seeds. “Sowing and caring for our seeds is an act of resistance, resilience and love for the land,” says Lubo Bonivento.
These initiatives seek not only to store seeds, but also to preserve the knowledge necessary for those seeds to continue existing in the future. The community handbooks created in Tekia contain stories, practices and recommendations passed down by the elders: what signs herald a good harvest, which foods should not be eaten after sowing, or which behaviours can upset the balance of the land.
To strengthen these processes, communities have begun to work in coordination with Wayuu and non-Wayuu professionals from fields such as biology, agronomy, agroecology and environmental conservation. The aim is to combine scientific tools for seed conservation and reproduction with ancestral knowledge of the territory’s climatic and spiritual cycles.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has documented how native seeds conserved by Indigenous peoples can be an important tool for tackling the climate crisis, given their resilience to extreme droughts and fragile ecosystems.
Blending scientific and traditional knowledge
Knowledge that for years was viewed as mere superstition now takes on new significance in the face of a climate crisis that is destabilising even scientific prediction models.
Whilst science speaks of altered hydrological cycles, desertification and loss of biodiversity, the Wayuu people speak of a territory that can no longer be read as it once was. In addition to community meetings and knowledge exchanges in Wayuunaiki, these conservation processes train young seed guardians and develop climate adaptation strategies designed by and for the Wayuu people. The goal is not only to protect crops but also to preserve the spiritual memory of the territory.
This is, perhaps, one of the most pressing warnings coming from communities such as Paraguachón and Tekia: the climate crisis is not only drying up the jagüeyes or destroying the harvests. It is also severing an ancestral bond between people, seeds, dreams and the land.
As the climate cycles of Woumainkat – “our territory” – continue to change, the Wayuu people endure through their words, their memories and their seeds. Because preserving a seed, in the middle of the desert, is also preserving a way of understanding life.
