Pursuing knowledge about nature was one of the key features of pre-Columbian cultures. This learning was built basically through their intense investigative curiosity and love for experimentation.  These attributes are artistically represented in many of their pieces of ceramics and goldsmithing. Unfortunately, there has been an uprooting of this ancient culture’s ideas and attitude.  What was once the dominant and talented culture has been ignored or dismissed, continuing up to this day.  It has resulted in a paradigm shift that overlooks knowledge about biodiversity and the vast and rich wisdom of life in all of its multivariant forms on earth. 

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Living together with great biodiversity entails multiple challenges, some of which are related to how much we know about our world. We are confident that one way to confront these challenges is to recover the unique role of research. Paying special tribute to the vision of the pre-Columbian cultures, our logo is based on a goldsmithing design of the Calima culture, in which artistic representations of lizards and monkeys are arranged in such a way that each body serves to give shape to the other.  Like the logo, we hope that through the Calima Foundation we can convey our heartfelt desire to serve as pursuers of scientific knowledge through innovative research who are willing to share the spectacular world of biodiversity with the world and thus give shape to a new paradigm of discovery.