Bonplandia: the páramo's laboratory
How a plant nursery in Pijao became a free science laboratory where 318 children do real botany.
On 14 August 2024, at the El Patio nursery in Pijao, something opened that existed in no neighbouring municipality: a free science and botany laboratory for the children of the rural schools.
We named it Bonplandia, after Aimé Bonpland, the botanist who travelled the Americas with Humboldt describing plants unknown to European science. We like to think that this curiosity — looking at a leaf as if for the first time — is exactly what the laboratory wants to awaken.
Today it is run by four biologists who graduated from the University of Quindío, and 318 children from 14 school campuses pass through its workbenches: the 12 campuses of the La Mariela school and the 2 of the Pijao school. Since 2025 there is also an academic pilot with the María Auxiliadora school.
Its philosophy fits in one sentence: “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.”
And there is already home-grown fruit: the laboratory’s children are the authors of 956 botanical records of their territory — work that reached the final of the 2026 Premios Verdes awards in Cuenca, Ecuador. This is not science “for” the community: it is science made by it.