El otro mar

In the year 1500, a nobleman from Extremadura arrived on the shores of America. He was an adventurer, like so many others, who grew rich only to be ruined just as quickly. He traveled as a stowaway to Tierra Firme (the Isthmus of Panama), fought, conspired, and destroyed in order to build new cities. He earned the title of governor of Veragua, and one day, this Vasco Núñez de Balboa heard a fabulous story from an indigenous chief: the story of "the other sea." According to the Kuna Indian, "south of the mountains of the Darién jungle, there existed an immense ocean, unknown to the white man, and on whose shores lived powerful tribes rich in gold and precious metals." Who knows if it was ambition, greed, or madness that drove those men to venture into that inhospitable province? Who knows what Vasco Núñez de Balboa truly experienced during those days of uncertainty and hardship? The story of what could have been is what Alfonso Zapico recreated in comics after crossing the Atlantic to explore a jungle area in Panama in the expedition organized by the Mare Australe Foundation in 2013, the same route followed by Núñez de Balboa and his men in 1513. Zapico made a kind of wet Camino de Santiago in very demanding conditions along 110 kilometers through the landscapes of the Darién natural park following in the footsteps of Vasco Núñez de Balboa until he reached that “other sea”, the Pacific Ocean.