Forty years after the catastrophe that erased Armero from the map, the landscape where the town once stood has taken on the quiet, uncanny stillness of an eroded manuscript. Vegetation has woven itself into the skeletal remains of walls and foundations, reclaiming what the earth so violently seized on the night of November 13, 1985.
A visitor walking through the overgrown grid of streets – once home to a thriving community of 30,000 – encounters not ruins so much as traces, impressions of a past life softened by time but sharpened by memory. Armero endures precisely in its absence: a void filled by recollection, mourning, and the uneasy knowledge that nature, indifferent to human design, can extinguish entire worlds in a matter of hours.
When the dormant Nevado del Ruíz volcano awakened after nearly seven decades of slumber, few imagined the scale of the catastrophe that would follow. A plume of ash, seemingly minor at first glance, rose into the turbulent night sky. But within hours, heat from the eruption destabilized the glacier that crowned the summit, releasing torrents of mud, ice, and volcanic debris into the river valleys below.
These lahars advanced with a terrifying, almost preternatural speed, converging on Armero just before midnight. By dawn, the town lay submerged beneath metres of viscous grey sludge. More than 21,000 people perished there; further up the mountain, the coffee community of Chinchiná also counted its dead.
The tragedy revealed itself to the world not only in statistics but in faces — most famously, in the steady, unwavering gaze of thirteen-year-old Omayra Sánchez, trapped in the wreckage of her home. Her three-day struggle for life, witnessed and photographed by international media, sparked a global reckoning with the limits of human aid and the ethical weight of watching suffering unfold. Her image, at once intimate and universal, transformed Armero from a local calamity into a symbol of vulnerability, resilience, and the high cost of institutional hesitancy.
In the decades since, Armero has entered Colombia’s national consciousness less as a geographical place than as a lesson — one that encompasses scientific foresight, governmental failure, and the haunting endurance of survival. Hazard maps existed; warnings were issued; yet decisions fell victim to bureaucratic inertia and political calculation. The lahar that swept through Armero was geological, but the disaster was also human. The tension between what could have been prevented and what, in the end, proved inevitable continues to shadow discussions about risk and memory in a country where nature’s volatility is part of its beauty and peril.
Today the site is marked by a monument erected by Pope John Paul II during his pastoral visit, yet this physical marker feels almost secondary when compared with the small rituals enacted by survivors who return to the green fields to pay their respects to the ones they loved and lost. Many who escaped the torrent resettled in Ibagué, spending years in temporary shelters before rebuilding lives that would never resemble the ones lost. Every November, they return to Armero not as tourists of desolation but as custodians of a story that requires retelling if it is to remain alive. They walk the faint paths of the former town, recalling neighbours whose names still rise easily to their lips; they light candles; they speak of the sounds – the roar of the cascading boulders, pleas in the darkness – that reverberate long after the mud settled and hardened.
To stand in Armero today is to confront both the fragility and tenacity of human experience. Nature’s capacity for ruination is evident in every vine-covered remnant, and yet so too is the impulse to remember, to narrate, to assign meaning where devastation once prevailed.
The anniversary does not resolve the moral questions that have surrounded the tragedy for four decades. But it invites a form of contemplation characteristic of places touched by profound loss: an awareness that memory persists even where the physical world has given way, and that the act of returning – year after year – is itself a testament to the endurance a community that remains together by the act of remembrance.
An abandoned street in Armero, Colombia. Photo: Dorian Ospino/Creative Commons
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