Brujas Take Over a City in Colombia During the Festival de Brujería

Candles flicker against the stone walls of the Claustro Comfama, their smoke curling upward like questions seeking their origin. In the heart of Medellín, Colombia, a crowd gathers where silence once ruled, drawn by a word heavy with centuries of fear and fascination. Brujería. Once spoken as accusation, it now rises like a song reclaimed from ashes, a word that refuses to remain buried.

The Ancestral Roots of the Forbidden

Before foreign prayers reached these mountains, the people of the Andes lived by rituals that honored balance. They spoke to rivers, traced healing on the skin with leaves and fire, and listened to the pulse of the earth. These were acts of medicine and memory, ways to read the invisible. When colonization arrived, those who carried that knowledge were forced to conceal it. Yet their practices endured in secret rooms, through the murmurs of women who prayed in code, through enslaved communities who merged their spirits with the saints they were told to obey.

What the world would later call witchcraft had always existed here under other names. It lived in the rhythmic pounding of drums, in the hands that gathered herbs before dawn, in the smoke that rose toward unseen gods. To practice it meant survival, not defiance. It preserved identity when power sought to erase it, a quiet act of continuation beneath centuries of rule.

The Return of the Festival de Brujería

This October, the Festival de Brujería returns that hidden lineage to daylight. The Claustro Comfama, once a convent and now a cultural center, opens its gates to rituals once condemned. According to El Colombiano, the event extends across two days of exhibitions, performances, and gatherings that treat witchcraft not as spectacle but as inheritance. Organizers frame it as an invitation to explore the multiplicity of spiritualities that shape Latin American identity, combining art, history, and ritual in a single pulse.

The festival also honors an earlier moment of awakening, the World Congress of Witchcraft held in Bogotá in 1975, when thousands convened to debate the philosophies and practices that colonial religion had labeled forbidden. That congress brought healers, mystics, and scholars together under one roof, affirming that spirituality could exist outside the structures that once condemned it. Fifty years later, Medellín’s fair echoes that energy through performances, artisan markets, and collective ceremonies that transform the city’s center into a crossroads of belief and imagination.

Controversy and Continuity

Not everyone greets the celebration with ease. Some see danger where others see culture, fear heresy where others perceive heritage. Yet the event persists without apology, framed as an act of cultural recognition rather than provocation. It treats witchcraft as a thread of ancestral wisdom, a body of practices tied to plants, music, and community rather than to fear.

Across the courtyard, incense mingles with the sound of tambourines. The aroma of herbs drifts through the night while hands trace circles in the air, echoing movements learned long before anyone wrote them down. Here, witchcraft becomes language again, a dialogue between body and spirit that has outlasted both empire and silence.

The Old Knowledge Still Breathing

The city quiets and the courtyard glows. Smoke folds into the air, carrying a memory that refuses translation. The rituals continue without spectacle, their rhythm measured and patient, their purpose ancient. The crowd disperses slowly, leaving behind a scent of wax and wood and earth. Somewhere in that stillness, the old knowledge keeps breathing.