Boruca

About Boruca:

Boruca covers about 126 square kilometres on the southern side of Buenos Aires canton, where the Río Grande de Térraba cuts through the hills on its way to the coast. The Interamericana Sur, Route 2, follows the river and serves Curré directly, some 30 kilometres southeast of Buenos Aires town on the way to Palmar Norte. Route 625, a 41-kilometre tertiary national road, runs through the district between Potrero Grande and Colinas. Boruca village sits higher up, in a small valley at around 600 metres and about 20 kilometres south of Buenos Aires town. The short way in leaves the Interamericana just after the long bridge over the Río Puerto Nuevo and climbs a ridge for twenty minutes or so. When heavy rain makes that road unsafe, drivers go round by the Térraba side, a much longer trip, and since only a short stretch in the village centre is paved, four-wheel drive is the sensible choice; a bus also runs to Buenos Aires town.

Crafts pay a lot of the bills. Men carve masks from balsa and sometimes cedar, women paint them and weave bags, scarves and blankets on back-strap looms with cotton dyed from plants such as sacatinta, achiote and nance, and visitors buy straight from the workshops in people’s homes. Mask carving was close to dying out before an elder, Don Ismael, revived it in the early 1970s; today about four in five people in the village take part in the craft trade. Artisans opened the Museo Comunitario Boruca in 2006, first built as a traditional rancho, and carving and weaving demonstrations are arranged there by appointment. Around the crafts the district farms as it always has, with maize, beans, rice, tubers and coffee, cattle, pigs and poultry, and in Curré many people also work for wages at neighbouring companies.

The year turns on the Fiesta de los Diablitos. From 30 December to 2 January, the men of Boruca put on masks they carved themselves to act out the Brunka resistance to the Spanish, and the village fills with visitors; Curré stages its own version in February. Spanish is the everyday language. The Brunka language survives with a handful of elderly speakers and is taught to children at school.

Boruca had 3,074 residents at the 2011 census, and not all of them are indigenous. That year about six in ten people in the Boruca territory identified as indigenous, and decades of sales the law never allowed left a large share of the land with outside owners: in 1994, indigenous families held less than half the land in Boruca territory and under a quarter in Rey Curré. Since the state set aside funds in 2022, INDER, the rural development institute, has been compensating good-faith non-indigenous occupants in territories across the south and handing their farms back to the communities. Both Boruca and Rey Curré have written their own plans for how recovered land should be used. Settlements are scattered on both banks of the Térraba, too, so Lagarto, for one, lies across the river some 15 kilometres from the centre of Curré.

Houses in Boruca:

Houses here are family homes, either in the village centre near the school and the museum or on the same land the family farms. Many double as workshops, with a porch or front room where masks are carved, painted and sold. In the centre of Boruca, roofs that were once thatch have been changing to metal sheet. If you are looking at houses in Boruca, start with who holds the right to the plot and whether the territory’s development association recognises it, then look at water, the road and the roof.

Land and Lots in Boruca:

Land is worked in small farms: maize, beans and rice, coffee on the slopes, pasture for a few head of cattle, and protected forest. The territory belongs to the community and is held through its development association, while families work their own parcels, and some farms are still registered to non-indigenous owners. A deed in the national registry does not override the Indigenous Law. Anyone weighing land in Boruca should expect riverside ground along the Térraba and steep hillsides to carry forest-protection strips, and should walk the boundaries with a neighbour who knows them.

FAQ:

• Can someone who is not indigenous buy property in Boruca?

  Not inside the Boruca or Rey Curré territories. Article 3 of the 1977 Indigenous Law makes the territories inalienable and bars non-indigenous people from buying, renting or leasing land within them, and in October 2022 the Constitutional Chamber rejected a challenge to that rule. A purchase made after the law came in can be voided whatever the deed says, so a cheap farm here is no bargain.

• How do I know whether a parcel is inside one of the territories?

  Get the plano catastrado and the folio real from the Registro Nacional (Registro Inmobiliario) and have a lawyer or surveyor lay the plan over the official boundaries of Boruca and Rey Curré. Ask the territory’s development association too, and check whether INDER already has the farm on its list for compensation. Ojo de Agua and Sabanas are split between Boruca and a neighbouring district, so confirm which district the plan shows as well.

• When is the Fiesta de los Diablitos?

  In Boruca it runs from 30 December to 2 January, and Curré holds its own in February. Those are the busiest days of the year for visitors and for mask sales. To see carving or weaving at another time, book through the community museum a day ahead.

• What happens to outside owners who already hold land in the territory?

  The law provides for non-indigenous occupants in good faith to be relocated or compensated and for the land to go back to the community. INDER has been making those payments in southern territories since 2022. Whoever you are dealing with, find out whether the farm is part of that process before any money changes hands.