One night in February, Antonio Villamizar was woken up suddenly in the small hours by a phone call. “Hurry up, your restaurant is being swept away,” he was warned. He jumped out of bed and rushed with his sons to his beachfront restaurant, only to find that it had gone.
The rising seas had destroyed the two-storey wooden building, dragging plastic chairs and tables out to sea, bringing down walls and ruining the kitchen.
“The sea came in and took it all away. I lost it completely,” says Villamizar, known as Toño. “It made you want to cry.”
Despite the frustration, it came as no surprise to Villamizar. In the 12 years of owning his restaurant on Palomino beach in the Guajira region on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, he has had to rebuild and move it 10 times because of rising sea levels and coastal erosion.
Since last December alone, he has had to relocate four times; his rebuilt restaurant sits on an estuary where the Palomino River meets the Caribbean Sea. In recent years, two fellow restaurateurs have been forced to close due to damage caused by the erosion.
“We are losing the beach very, very quickly. We are scared of rebuilding; it’s worrisome to lose money again,” Villamizar says, standing among his restaurant’s red plastic tables crowded with customers. “But we must keep rebuilding and finding new ways to keep fighting, as much as the sea will let us, because this is our livelihood…”
