The classroom without walls: educating with the páramo
Conservation workshops, a laboratory inside a plant nursery and trips to the ecosystem where water is born — how the territory became our best classroom.
There is a pedagogical decision behind everything the Foundation does: the territory is the classroom. We do not teach “about” the páramo from a whiteboard; we take learning to where the water is born, where the seed germinates, where the plant has a name of its own.
You can see it in small, documented things. On 15 March 2025, for instance, 25 children from a Pijao school took part in an environmental education workshop centred on páramo conservation, its biodiversity and the importance of water for coffee-growing communities: native species, the water cycle in the ecosystem, and everyday actions to protect it. An ordinary Saturday, a lesson that is not forgotten.
You can see it in the Bonplandia Laboratory, which works inside a plant nursery — the classroom smells of damp earth. Its philosophy says it all: “knowledge is born of patient observation, of wonder at life, and of the desire to understand nature as it expresses itself in every leaf, in every root.” From that patient observation have come 956 botanical records made by the children themselves (as of May 2026).
And you can see it in the trips to the Chilí páramo of the Future Nexus programme, where many young people meet for the first time the ecosystem that gives the Foundation its name and gives their homes their water.
The underlying lesson is a single one: conservation is not learned out of obligation, it is learned out of wonder. No one protects what they do not know; almost no one stops protecting what has taken their breath away. That is why our favourite classroom has no walls — it has mist, frailejones and children with muddy boots.