← Blog · 2026-09-12

Guatapé's Fishermen: A Community Adapting to Change

Before the tour boats, before the jet skis, before the floating bars — the reservoir belonged to the fishermen. They're still here, launching before dawn while the town sleeps, but their world has changed around them. This is their story.

A Day on the Water

Fishermen head out between 4 and 5 AM, well before the first tourist activity on the reservoir. Their lanchas are smaller and simpler than the tour boats — flat-bottomed wooden craft with outboard motors, loaded with nets and lines rather than LED lights and speakers. They work the quieter inlets and deeper channels where mojarra and tilapia concentrate.

A good day yields enough fish to supply the local market and a handful of restaurants. The catch has declined over the decades — a combination of water-level management by EPM (which fluctuates for hydroelectric needs, not fishing), increased boat traffic disturbing fish patterns, and competition from aquaculture operations that undercut wild-catch prices.

The Economic Squeeze

Fishing alone no longer supports a family in Guatapé the way it did a generation ago. Most fishing families supplement their income with tourism-adjacent work: running boat tours during peak hours, renting their lanchas for private charters, or having family members work in restaurants and hotels. The fisherman who takes you across the reservoir at 10 AM may have been pulling nets at 5 AM.

This hybrid livelihood is increasingly common. It preserves the fishing tradition — many families maintain it as much for identity as for income — while acknowledging economic reality. The ones who've navigated it best are those who leverage their knowledge of the reservoir's geography and ecology into guided fishing tours and private excursions that pay significantly more than the fish themselves.

Why It Matters for Visitors

When you see fishing lanchas on the reservoir in the early morning, you're watching the oldest continuous economic activity on this body of water — older than the tour boats, older than the jet skis, older than the town's tourism identity. These families survived displacement (the flooding), economic marginalization (tourism's dominance), and ecological change (the reservoir's management). Their persistence is quiet and stubborn.

If you eat fish at a Guatapé restaurant, ask if it's from the embalse. Locally caught reservoir fish tastes different from the farmed stuff — smaller, leaner, with a cleaner flavor. Choosing it supports the fishing economy directly. A few restaurants still buy exclusively from local fishermen and are proud to say so.