In the 1960s, an aristocratic Colombian development specialist named Paolo Lugari took a road trip across these nearly uninhabited eastern plains, a region so remote and poor in soil quality that not even Colombia’s historic upheavals of violence had taken root here at the time.

Farmers in Las Gaviotas, a Colombian village founded in the arid eastern plains 40 years ago, use a special tool, above, to plant pines that produce resin for biofuel.

The village uses the biofuel in its tractors and processes other resin for market sale. The New York Times

Las Gaviotas is about 16 hours by jeep from Bogotá.

Stopping to rest in this vast expanse, written off by agronomists as the equivalent of a tropical desert, Mr. Lugari decided it was the perfect place to experiment with the future of civilization. He founded a village unlike any other in this war-weary country.

“The only deserts that exist in this world are deserts of the imagination,” said Mr. Lugari, 64, on a visit this month to the community he named after the river gulls, or gaviotas, he saw flying overhead on that trip more than 40 years ago.