It took Ana María Casas 23 years of cooking at the Santa Cecilia school cooperative to build the house that she lost in a matter of seconds during the earthquake that shook Paratebueno and Medina, Cundinamarca, on June 8, 2025.
This Thursday, one year after that morning in which she was paralyzed while the roof collapsed on her and her family, she once again held keys in her hands: those to her new home.
Ana María Casas with the keys to her new house. Photo:Oscar Fabián Bernal.
“The scare was terrible, I stayed sitting until my son, who cut his arm with a tile that fell on him, lifted me out of the chair. He took me out of the house, I reacted a little and walked to my son’s house,” said Ana María, who at that time lived alone because her children had already taken different paths.
“At my son’s house,” she added, “I found the neighbor’s daughter under the wooden debris, so I called the Chinese man so that, in the midst of the daze we had, he would help take out the girl, who is disabled—she has a part of her body immobile—and he touched three boys so that they could take her out and she would stop screaming.”
After the scare, Ana María went to live in Bogotá with relatives, she stayed there for four months, until she returned to Santa Cecilia. Of Ana María’s house, only the kitchen remained standing; she had recently remodeled it, but the engineers who inspected it determined that everything had to be demolished.
Since then, she went to live in her son’s house, which she also shares with her daughter, and continues to support herself by selling food to the residents of Santa Cecilia.
Sell reds
Rosa Lilia Lara, who has been selling red wines in Santa Cecilia for more than twenty years, her husband died two years ago, she prefers not to remember the details of the terrible moments of the earthquake that completely destroyed her home.
Rosa Lilia Lara, red wine seller in Santa Cecilia. Photo:Oscar Fabián Bernal.
The house had four rooms where they lived with their daughter and grandson, and one bedroom was rented. “The roofs broke my daughter’s hand, cracked her waist and we had to go to Bogotá, I was very sick for a month and I arrived here after three months and without a home,” she recalled.
“I was too lazy to return, but here the people are very good and they invited me to return, they gave me two thermoses and I started living again in my son Gerson Alexander’s house, with my daughter and my grandson. “This house – his son’s – suffered some damage on the outside,” he says.
The reconstruction
The governor of Cundinamarca, Jorge Emilio Rey, announced that the construction of the 610 homes destroyed by the earthquake began and a similar number of houses will receive support to overcome the damage they suffered, as well as the 44 educational centers destroyed or affected in Medina and Paratebueno.
In the first phase, 341 homes will be built, 156 by the Government of Cundinamarca, 145 by the National Disaster Risk Management Unit and 40 by the Minuto de Dios Corporation.
Mrs. Ana María Casas was the first to receive her house from the Government of Cundinamarca, which will finish building it in December, the Minuto de Dios will deliver it in October and the UNGR will do so next year.
Rosa Lilia Lara and her daughter Photo:Oscar Fabián Bernal.
The president said that it remains to be established whether housing can be built in Nuevo Horizonte and in the La Europa neighborhood or whether they must be moved to another place, but that depends on the result of a technical concept being carried out by the Colombian Geological Service.
In terms of affected road infrastructure, the collapses have been attended to and recovery work has been carried out on the roads that go from Marginal de la Selva to Medina, and in the sectors of Santa Teresa Choapal and Los Alpes, among others.
For her part, the president of the Santa Cecilia community action board, Marta Cecilia Wan, said she was grateful and blessed because after the magnitude of the earthquake “no person died, even though in seconds everything was on the ground and today it is rising.”
After thanking the governor of Cundinamarca and the mayor of Paratebueno, Norberto Noreña, for the efforts made so that the town center could be rebuilt again, he expressed his concern because there are still no resources to build the church that the earthquake destroyed.
In this regard, Mayor Noreña assured that there are already some designs to build it, but “there is a prohibition on the investment of public resources for these types of projects, but we are doing an articulated job of looking at how, by recognizing some social issues that the church represents, some resources can be allocated and we hope to sit down with the technicians, with the curia and with the Minuto de Dios Corporation to see how we can build the church.”
While Rosa Lilia maintains that “she is happy today because they have already started building their house and it will be the second one that they are going to deliver,” so that “with God’s blessing I already have my little house.”
And Ana María says she is happy to receive the keys to her new house, “not just anyone does that, I am very grateful, I always trust in God and the Most Holy Mary who are the ones who can do everything and I thank the entities that are doing all the work to rebuild our houses.”
NELSON ARDILA ARIAS
Special for EL TIEMPO
Santa Cecilia, ParateBueno, Cundinamarca.
Photo:THE TIME
