When we made it to the bottom of the slope, I took in my surroundings. The property looked enormous, ranging all the way from the Vía San Luis to the point that’s now the Botanical Garden. It had been inherited by a native, a distant relative who decided to sell, as many had. Lucky for me, though, it’s been designated for conservation. Rudy told me that the Raizal struggle for autonomy is also propelled by land loss: that’s what Maynard meant by the ‘configuration of territory’ – he pronounced ‘territorio’ with a hard Anglo r, like Maa Josephine – in an argument during the thinkin’ rundown.

The painful loss of land, a community’s silent downhill displacement, an externality justified by the insistence on natural waves of economic liberties. So it goes: why did the locals sell, then? It was their own fault, people say. I felt and still feel enraged, indignant.

Rudy’s t-shirt was soaked and his jeans scrunched, but he walked nimbly and didn’t get worked up as he spoke. He wiped the sweat from his forehead onto his shoulders and paused for a moment, as if organising his thoughts.

‘That’s what the Raizal statute is for. You must have heard about the statute at some point.’ Never, I said. ‘The struggle is a response to the policies of cultural homogenisation, right? And to the way the sales were made. But it’s also a reaction to the fires that burned down the notary and the old Intendancy, remember? Lots of land went to mainlanders after that.’

Today, he went on, there are many lawsuits over land ownership after the property titles disappeared in those deliberate fires. The locals didn’t keep copies of the deeds and some didn’t even have any in the first place, because they acquired their land through verbal agreements, as was customary on the islands.

Most of the population was still native; that is, from families with multi-generational roots, regardless of their origins. After the fires in the 1970s, the national land agency declared San Andrés a vacant territory: that’s right, Rudy confirmed when I yelped, incredulous. No man’s land. Yet another reason to resent ‘Colombianness’. Almost everyone had come into their properties verbally, the British way. Many mainlanders used the chaos to their advantage and made themselves titled landowners, levying lawsuits of their own and summoning witnesses to say that they had effectively occupied the sites in question for a certain number of years – easy as that. Besides, decades prior, Colombia in its conservative century had established that only Catholics could inherit property. I no longer imagine Rebecca being baptised in the First Baptist Church, because there were no disputes over Bowie lands, as far as I know. Now the task is to find some way to repair the harm done by the Intendancy, by the Free Port, by the opening. The statute is a kind of corrective measure, Rudy told me.