Ceibas in the Dry Season, on the Road to El Peligro

In the height of the dry season, when the forest lays bare its bones, a group of students set out from La Manga toward El Peligro under the guidance of José Marín. The landscape that greeted them was the tropical dry forest without pretense: yellowed grass, dust-coated shrubs, and trees that had shed their leaves the way one shrugs off a coat. Against that backdrop of apparent desolation, they recorded three ceibas — those grey-barked giants whose distant spines command respect — and an orejero (Enterolobium cyclocarpum) standing solemn and unhurried amid the sparse vegetation. The day's most curious find was a split dry fruit from the Apocynaceae family, discovered at the very start of the trail. Its outer shell was grey-green, but inside it held a quiet surprise: a seed wrapped in reddish, hair-like fibers, as though the tree had tucked something tender into the heart of all that roughness. Someone photographed it against the blue sky, the bare hillside stretching to the horizon behind it, and the image became a small portrait of what the dry forest is capable of keeping — even on its most parched and unforgiving days.