ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Waterscapes: Plural Water Knowledge and Environmental Transformation along the Canal del Dique

• In Event: Water Knowledge and Water Experts II

English Abstract

The paper examines the Canal del Dique as a contested waterscape shaped by competing forms of water knowledge across three centuries of Colombian and Caribbean history. First opened in the 1650s as a seasonal outlet linking the Magdalena River with Cartagena, the canal was never a stable hydraulic structure but a shifting hydrosocial frontier where imperial ambitions, local practices, and ecological processes continually collided. Drawing on colonial engineering plans, nineteenth-century development schemes, and twentieth-century rectification projects, the paper reconstructs how successive interventions in river morphology and coastal hydrology reshaped Cartagena Bay. Over time, these transformations turned an open marine basin into a sediment-laden deltaic system with lasting consequences for wetlands, fisheries, and Afro-descendant communities living in amphibious environments.
By examining engineers, merchants, riverine workers, dredging contractors, and fisherfolk as plural “water experts,” the paper shows how official visions of control persistently relied on vernacular knowledge while simultaneously marginalising it. Recurrent sedimentation, flooding, and salinity shifts repeatedly undermined technical designs, exposing the fragility of infrastructural authority. By positioning the Canal del Dique within key analytical debates in water history, the paper shows that its trajectory is not a linear story of hydraulic progress but the emergence of a dynamic and deeply contested socio-natural assemblage central to Colombia’s Caribbean waterscape.

Author

• Christiane Hoth de Olano, Dr