Justice

Inside the ‘City of Women’

A refuge to only a small portion of the millions displaced by violence in Colombia, it still offers a powerful model of resistance and rebuilding.
Joaquín Sarmiento/FNPI

The air in the courtyard is humid and still. As day turns to dusk, cooking smells waft through open windows and the sound of frying onions and peppers joins a duet of dogs and television sets. Mango trees offer welcome shade, their limbs heavy with fruit. A few blocks away is a playground carefully lined with tires painted in Easter egg pastels. At this hour, the playground is hard at work: swings swinging, slides sliding, and a handful of teenagers playing soccer. A sign at the edge of the gravel yard offers warning to both children and adults: Cuidado el machismo mata. (“Watch out: Machismo kills.”)

The City of Women, on the outskirts of Turbaco, Colombia, is designed by women for women, an answer to the decades of civil war that have left women vulnerable to violence, sexual assault, and forced displacement. For some of the women who live here, building the city meant just that. They started by constructing a concrete-block making facility, then taught themselves how to make bricks. They dug ditches and poured foundations, built roofs and painted houses in bright shades of parrots and plants. The result of their years of hard-fought labor is a community of ninety-eight houses, a sanctuary for survivors.