The Donama Stone: Tracing Kogi memory in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

On Saturday, September 12, 2026, in the company of Kogi women and their children, I had the good fortune to discover a place that cannot truly be described—it must be felt.
Nestled in the hills separating the Río Piedras and Río Manzanares valleys, not far from the corregimiento of Bonda, near Santa Marta, lies an engraved rock that the Kogi call Donama (sometimes spelled Duanama). It is about this encounter, and what the Mamos say about it, that I would like to speak to you today.

Here is a video excerpt that provides a better understanding of this site, with an explanation in English and Spanish.

What is the Piedra de Donama?

The Piedra de Donama is a massive block of granite, a monolith about two to three meters high and nearly four meters in diameter, whose surface is entirely covered with petroglyphs: abstract motifs, geometric figures, and some zoomorphic representations, notably birds, carved in bas-relief. It is believed that these carvings were created by the Tayrona, the pre-Columbian civilization of which the Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco, and Kankuamo are today the direct heirs, between 500 and 1525 AD, before the arrival of the Spanish colonists.

Around the main stone, other rocks bear more discreet symbols. The carved birds evoke the sky, and thus a proximity to the sun, the Creator, and symbolically to the world to come. The exact meaning of most of these patterns remains a mystery to Western archaeology, but not to those who have grown up with them.

A brain-stone, a map of the world

What is most striking is the interpretation that the current indigenous communities give to this stone: for them, Donama is a representation of the brain, or even a map of the world. Some researchers, such as the Italian Yuri Leveratto, have proposed a similar hypothesis, seeing in it a symbolic representation of the link between the human brain and nature.

In Kogi cosmovision, none of this is trivial. The material world is, to them, only the visible trace of a world of thought: Aluna.
Aluna is often described as the primordial consciousness, the source of all life, the place where every being—animal, vegetable, mineral, human—is first "thought" before existing in the physical world. A stone like Donama would then be an anchor point for this memory: a place where the vital energy of Aluna remains particularly dense and accessible.

This is why the name of the "inter-species bio-communication" project we are developing with the University of Magdalena is called "Aluna Sounds."

The role of the Mamos

One cannot speak of Donama without speaking of the Mamos, the spiritual guides of the Kogi. The word literally means "the one who is enlightened" or "the one who knows."
From birth, certain children are identified as future Mamos and spend a large part of their childhood—sometimes nine, sometimes eighteen years—in darkness and isolation, away from the sensible world, to learn to connect fully with Aluna before even learning to see the light of day.

What is unthinkable in our Western world is normal for these communities, whose essence is to remain connected to the living and to every source of life.

The role of the Mamo is not only religious in the sense we understand in the West. He is a doctor, a teacher, a judge, a guardian of the world's balance.
His task, in Kogi cosmology, is to bridge the physical world and Aluna, so that destructive forces are kept in check and harmony is maintained—not only for his village, but for the entire Earth. Places like the Piedra de Donama are among the points that the Mamos watch over, honor, and "read," much like one would consult a map or an ancient text, to understand the state of the world and transmit the ritual gestures necessary for its balance.

An encounter rather than a visit

What makes this experience so special is that it did not play out as a tourist relationship with an "archaeological site." I was accompanied by Arhuaca women and their children, for whom this stone is not a relic of the past but a living place, charged with meaning in their daily lives. Seeing them move around Donama, passing on snatches of knowledge to their children almost naturally, gave this stone carving a presence that neither books nor photos can convey.

This is also the heart of the world that the Kogi speak of when referring to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta: a territory conceived as a living organism, where every peak, every river, every stone has a function in a vaster balance—that of the entire planet, according to their cosmovision.
We were also told that these stones were like portals to other places on Earth and that the Mamos can access different locations via these stones.
When they come to France or Switzerland, they arrive through these "portals" that, in our lands, are connected to these engraved stones in the Sierra Nevada.

Why this place deserves respect

The Piedra de Donama can be visited, but it should be visited with regard. It is not a simple archaeological curiosity placed in a jungle setting: it is a sacred, active place for communities that still live according to the teachings passed down by their Mamos. Accessing it accompanied, as I had the chance to do, allows one to receive a little of what this place truly carries beyond the stone itself.