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EL ESPECTADOR

Bogota To Create Latin America's Largest Urban Nature Reserve

Happy future residents: short-eared owl, feijoa flowers, dendropsophus labialis
Happy future residents: short-eared owl, feijoa flowers, dendropsophus labialis
El Espectador

BOGOTA Authorities in Bogota are banning road and building construction across 14 square kilometers (5.4 square miles) in the Colombian capital, in a bid to create the largest urban nature reserve in Latin America.

New restrictions will turn a sector of the existing Thomas van der Hammen Reserve into a "biodiversity corridor" spanning Guaymaral, Corpas and Suba, three adjacent districts of northern Bogota, a city increasingly marked by high-rise construction and extreme air pollution.

The reserve will protect wetlands and wildlife exclusive to the area, not to mention subterranean waters. The Northern Bogota Regional Forest Reserve plan "envisages ... restrictions on owners in the Reserve, though we also intend to start buying plots, which will allow us to start building and designing a park," Bogota planning chief Gerardo Ardila says.

He says the city will be able to create "an environmental park of great value and one of the biggest parks in Latin America." The municipality has already begun buying nine plots of land here, where it plans to plant two million plants, 300,000 of which are coming from the Bogota Botanical Garden.

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Ideas

A Brazilian Plea For Science, Religious Freedom And The Right To Samba As You Wish

An evangelic group has threatened to take legal action against a samba school because of its mix of religious iconography at the 2023 Carnival festivities. A Brazilian secular institute has a response.

Photo of Rio's carnival 2015

Rio carnival in full swing

Daniel Gontijo E Pirula

-OpEd-

SÃO PAULO — To celebrate religious diversity at 2023 carnival, the samba school Gaviões da Fiel in São Paolo combined Christian symbols with imagery from African religions — for example, Christ with Oxalá (a deity from Candomblé, an African diasporic religion).

Gaviões received a disclaimer note from the country's conservative Evangelical Parliamentary Front (FPE). In these politicians’ view, "one cannot compare Christ and Oxalá … under no circumstances", and there would only be one god, one Son, and one Holy Spirit.

Having interpreted this artistic syncretism as an immoral, vile act, the FPE is now threatening to take legal action against the samba school.

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