“We often see them,” says Maria Isabel Pamplona, a hotel receptionist. “They don’t come to the village centre, where the motorway passes, but they walk the smaller roads. They like to stay at a nearby lake and river.”
Others have reported seeing hippos on the outskirts of the village, and even eating grass in a football field. “We are not afraid of them, as they have never bitten anyone. They are used to people,” says Hector Giraldo, a waiter.
The animals – normally found in the wild only in Africa – are wandering into the village from the Hacienda Napoles, the former estate of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, which is located just outside Doradal in the north-western Antioquia region.
This 3,000-hectare estate was used as a base by the head of the Medellin drug cartel in the late 1970s and 1980s. Back then, it consisted of extravagant Spanish colonial buildings, a bullring, a collection of luxury cars and an airstrip used by drug planes.
It even had a private zoo with hundreds of exotic animals, including four hippos – three female and one male – that Escobar had purchased from a zoo in California.
After the drug lord – held responsible for at least 5,000 killings – was gunned down by security forces in 1993, the estate fell into disrepair.
Many of the animals died of hunger, and most of the others were sold to zoos. But the hippos were left behind and soon began to multiply.
After having been abandoned for more than a decade, the Hacienda Napoles is now a privately run theme park where artificial waterfalls and museums stand alongside Escobar’s concrete dinosaurs.
The zoo has been resurrected, and is now home to animals including tigers, elephants, zebras and ostriches. The management declined to give DPA information on the zoo, saying it would only speak to media that had been screened by a committee.
Hardly any of the animals in the park still date from the days of Pablo Escobar, according to guides who did not want to be named. The “cocaine hippos” are the exception.
Fences have been unable to contain the hippos, which venture out of the park in search of food, larger pastures than the 30 hectares they have around their lake, and new territory for young males.
There are currently estimated to be around 50 of them. “Within two years, the number could increase to about 70,” says David Echeverri from the regional environmental corporation Cornare.
Hippos in the park include Vanessa, who lives in a pond of her own after having been rejected by the herd and comes ashore to munch on carrots handed out by tourists.
Her apparently tame behaviour has contributed to an impression among local people that hippos are harmless, cuddly animals – an idea which could hardly be more wrong.
Hippos are one of the most aggressive animal species in the world, especially when they have young to care for or are males looking for territory, according to the website HippoWorlds.
While there are no exact figures on how many people have been killed by hippos, they are greatly feared in Africa, where they reportedly kill far more people than snakes or lions.
Authorities in charge of the Doradal area have warned residents about the hippos from the Hacienda Napoles, according to reports in the daily El Colombiano.
But as they keep wandering out of the park, “it becomes likelier every year that [an attack] will occur,” Echeverri says.
Meanwhile, it is unclear what kind of an impact the hippos, some of which have been spotted dozens of kilometres away from the Hacienda Napoles, are having on the environment.
“They could be disturbing the normal conditions in water bodies and creating environmental impacts typical of invading species,” Echeverri says. This could include displacing native otters or capybaras, he adds.
A new fence, consisting of stone blocks and spiky plants, is currently being built to keep the hippos in the park. The plan is to combine that approach with increasing their access to food inside, castrations, and sending some of them away.
“We are in touch with zoos abroad which might want to take hippos. There is interest in Uruguay and Mexico,” Echeverri says. – DPA