Learning to Challenge the Canon to Build Your Library (and Passport)

Corals that are gone, sargassum that persists, and why I keep designing journeys

I travelled with my father to the Riviera Maya in 2010 to complete our diving certification. We immersed ourselves in what was known as the second largest barrier reef in the world. Four unforgettable dives: we swam alongside giant turtles, crossed natural tunnels formed by coral, and, while parasailing, saw from the air the immensity of the Mexican Caribbean, with its turquoise, cobalt blue and emerald green stripes.

During four days of training, I paid 400 dollars to learn how to breathe underwater in front of such wonder. The phrase —“second largest barrier reef in the world”— I had found the night before on Wikipedia, thrilled to have such a treasure just nine hours from Buenos Aires. It felt like a privilege to see it, to have it here in the Americas.

Tour operators preferred other adjectives: “crystalline waters”, “unique biodiversity”, “unforgettable experience”.

I learned that nitrogen can kill you if you ascend too quickly, that moray eels may mistake your finger for a fish, that you should never touch coral. Nobody mentioned that the coral we were told not to touch was already dying. Silence was part of the product. We had paid for a dream, not for an ecology lesson.

Cozumel, with its famous coral walls, remained pending. But even then we knew the reefs were in danger.

The return and the invisible brigades

I went back in 2017, this time to Tulum, though I didn’t dive. Armed with Google Maps and determined to avoid crowds, I found a beach labelled by algorithms as a “hidden gem.” At six in the morning, waiting for the sunrise, I discovered another scene: cleaning brigades.

Four men with rakes and a pickup truck collected mountains of algae before the first tourists arrived. They worked silently, efficiently, invisibly. When I asked, one said: “It’s temporary, miss. Just currents.” But his eyes said otherwise. It was 2017 and sargassum had been arriving for six years. How long does “temporary” last when no one dares to name it?

Living in Mexico, I learned that sargassum was no longer a seasonal inconvenience but a crisis shaping every conversation about Caribbean tourism. The question was no longer if it would come, but how to hide it.

The new Caribbean vocabulary

I learned a coded language of the industry:

• “Variable natural conditions” (there is sargassum).
• “Authentic Caribbean experience” (you’ll see the reality outside postcards).
• “Coastal renewal season” (do not come these months).
• And the most perverse: “Opportunity to discover other attractions.” As if ecological collapse were an invitation to buy more tours.

What caught my attention: the conversation always focused on economic impact. Almost never on environmental effects. And rarely on the reef itself.

The sargassum belt

Since 2011, beaches once ranked among the cleanest in the world have received tons of floating algae called sargassum. What first seemed like an anomaly became an annual pattern, with increasingly severe consequences.

Sargassum —Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans— has always existed, drifting in the North Atlantic as part of a healthy ecosystem. The problem is scale: excess nutrients from the Amazon and Orinoco, global warming, altered currents. All combined to form the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, a strip of more than 8,000 kilometres of algae —the size of 800 Buenos Aires— that drifts every year from Africa to the Caribbean.

It doesn’t just ruin postcards. It blocks sunlight corals need, releases toxic gases as it decomposes, alters water pH, and fosters bacteria competing with reefs. All this while the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef already suffers bleaching, acidification, and pollution.

In Martinique, a school was forced to close because of the gases. In Barbados, hotel occupancy fell 40% as sargassum was removed by truckloads. In the Lesser Antilles, fishermen fought with tangled nets. Yet on Instagram, the Caribbean still looked unchanged.

The questions that change

In 2010 I asked: Where’s the best visibility? At what depth are the turtles? Is the water warm?

Now I ask: Why is the water hotter each year? What stories are left untold? For whom does this paradise exist? Does my presence speed its decline?

Sometimes I think my diving certification was also a historical document: Certified Open Water Diver, Riviera Maya, 2010. Translation: authorised to explore a world that once existed.

Travelling to remember

Sargassum is not just an aesthetic nuisance. It is a messenger insisting on speaking while we perfect the art of not listening. Like climate change, it feels enormous, complex, ungraspable. But one thing is within our reach: stop looking away. Name what is happening. Remember. Because sometimes, remembering coral is also a way of trying to save it.

While the Caribbean learned to hide its wound, I sought another sea. On the Pacific, the Sea of Cortez revealed biodiversity the Caribbean had already lost. In La Paz —not in Cabo’s all-inclusive resorts— I swam with sea lions, watched manta rays leap, realised that balance is still possible in some places.

It is not that resort tourism is the only cause of collapse. But when a place becomes a stage for unreflective consumption —drinks, parties, selfies— it loses its ability to teach, to transform. And without transformation, why travel?

Journeys with memory

At HeySole! I design journeys for those who, like me, seek more than crystalline waters. For those who understand that travel is also about bearing witness, asking questions, creating conscious memories.

Because knowing a place is not only about where to eat the best ceviche or find the quietest beach. It is about understanding its silences, its transformations, its beauty and its wounds.

If this text made you think differently about how we travel, share it. Because remembering a coral is also a way of caring for it.

A story of urban decisions, necessary failures, and the courage to reinvent

Did you know Buenos Aires chose to build a port that wouldn’t work just to look like Europe? This is the story of Puerto Madero: when prestige beat pragmatism… and how that “failure” became Latin America’s boldest urban transformation.
In 1882, two projects disputed not just the port of Buenos Aires, but the idea the city had of itself. Luis Huergo—engineer, pragmatic—proposed straight piers following the river’s geography: functional, economical, designed for a port-city growing from work. Eduardo Madero—nephew of Vice President Francisco Madero, well-connected—imagined closed docks Liverpool-style: symmetrical, ornamental, worthy of a capital that always looked to Europe before understanding itself.

The battle between creole pragmatism and imported prestige was won by Madero. Between 1887 and 1898, English architects John Hawkshaw and Harrington Hayter designed from London a port that Thomas Walker & Co. built with red brick docks that looked like industrial cathedrals transplanted from England. Armstrong Whitworth cranes presided over a beautiful but dysfunctional port: it was scenography before infrastructure.

By 1911 they were already building Puerto Nuevo following—irony of fate—Huergo’s ideas. In 1925, the last ships abandoned Madero’s docks. The port born to impress remained an urban relic: over 60 years of abandonment, with monumental warehouses taken over by entire colonies of rats, in the heart of a city that preferred not to look toward the river.

The Archaeology of Abandonment

My grandmother saw it from her ANMAT office: that landscape of abandonment Buenos Aires had naturalized. Brick warehouses bitten by humidity, metal structures rusting in the open, weeds growing between railway tracks. It was the exact reverse of the dreamed port: the place where the city stored its most visible failure.

For over half a century, Puerto Madero was the porteño urban unconscious. There lay the consequences of choosing appearance over function, prestige over pragmatism. The 1882 decision had become ruins, and the ruins had become normality.

But cities, like people, sometimes need to hit bottom to reinvent themselves.

The Laboratory of Reinvention

In 1991, when the Antiguo Puerto Madero Corporation—an unprecedented mixed management model in Argentina—decided it was time to transform that urban edge, it wasn’t just about recovering buildings. It was redefining what city we wanted to be. Again, geography as politics; urbanism as self-portrait.

My father moved near Puerto Madero in the late ‘90s, when cranes still drew the skyline and every walk was archaeology of the future. We went to watch the El Faro towers grow, to walk the Puente de la Mujer as if we were the first to step on it, to witness how the old Molinos silos became lofts with the Armstrong Whitworth cranes still present as silent witnesses of this place’s two eras: industrial and residential.

The parks with straight lines and millimetric grass were our laboratory of modernity: a Buenos Aires without broken sidewalks or improvised corners. But also something more: planned green spaces where there was only abandonment, pedestrian walks connecting the city with the river, cultural infrastructure democratizing access to contemporary art.

Because Puerto Madero isn’t just corporate towers and restaurants over the dock—though that’s the most sold postcard. It’s also the Fortabat Museum with first-class Argentine art, the Ecological Reserve that self-regenerated over rubble, the running paths where anyone can train for free, the Nereidas Fountain that migrated from Plaza de Mayo to find its definitive place facing the river, the historic frigate Sarmiento telling Argentine naval history.

Beyond the Tourist Postcard

Later I moved nearby and Puerto Madero became my morning running track, my green refuge in a city breathing concrete, my direct connection to the river without traffic light mediation. There I understood this neighborhood has multiple layers of use, not all visible in tourist guides.

At 7 AM, while waiters dressed as gauchos still sleep, Puerto Madero belongs to runners, dog walkers, retirees doing tai chi facing the river. At 8, it fills with office workers walking toward their mirrored corporate buildings. At 6 PM, it’s territory for families seeking free space for kids to ride bikes. On weekends, it transforms into a rest destination: picnics, bike rides, and mate.

Is it gentrification? Yes, also. But it’s more complex than that.

The Politics of Urban Transformation

Here’s the tension that defines Puerto Madero and, really, defines every successful urban transformation: can a space be simultaneously exclusive and inclusive? Can state planning coexist with private investment without one canceling the other?

For many porteños, Puerto Madero remains empty ostentation, a non-place that doesn’t belong to them, a real estate experiment disguised as a neighborhood. And they’re partially right: it’s expensive to live there, many restaurants target tourism, the aesthetics sometimes seem forced.

But it’s also true that where there was wasteland now there are 28 hectares of public green spaces within the Puerto Madero project. That Costanera Sur, which went from elegant beach resort in the ’20s to marginalized zone in the ‘70s, today is part of the largest green space complex in downtown Buenos Aires along with the 350-hectare Ecological Reserve. That Argentine art has an exhibition space (the Fortabat Museum) that didn’t exist before. That thousands of people can access the river in a city that historically turned its back on water.

One of the new walkways in the Ecological Reserve.

Puerto Madero’s true lesson isn’t that urban transformation is good or bad per se. It’s that cities, like living organisms, need to evolve or die. And that sometimes, paradoxically, the most resounding failure can become the most valuable opportunity.

Buenos Aires chose wrong in 1882. It built an English port on River Plate geography, prioritized image over function, bet on imported prestige over local innovation. The result was predictable: a port that didn’t work, obsolete before turning 40.

But that error became, a century later, the raw material for one of Latin America’s boldest urban transformations. Abandoned Victorian warehouses became lofts and cultural centers. Dysfunctional docks transformed into water mirrors multiplying the sky. Rusty rails became green paths.

The Geography of the Present

I insist Puerto Madero is to be lived: to breathe air coming from water, to see art between historic docks, to understand that sometimes a city needs to invent spaces where none existed. It’s not nostalgia or pure speculation: it’s geography of the present, a piece of Buenos Aires that dared not resemble any other.

Is it perfect? No. Is it inclusive? Not completely. Did it solve all Buenos Aires’ urban problems? Of course not.

But it did achieve something that seemed impossible: returning the river to a city that had forgotten it was a port. And that, in a metropolis of 15 million inhabitants, is no small thing.

Next time you walk through Puerto Madero—whether to run, see an exhibition, or yes, even eat at one of those restaurants overlooking the dock—remember you’re stepping on the materialization of a question all cities ask themselves: who are we and who do we want to be?

Buenos Aires took 109 years to answer it. But when it did, it built not just a new neighborhood, but a new way of thinking about itself.

And tell me: Do you have your own Puerto Madero experience? Or some place in your city that completely changed and generates mixed feelings? I love reading these stories in the comments.

If this story resonated with you, share it. You surely know someone who needs to rediscover their own city with different eyes.

A slow logbook of panoramic trains, alpine villages and medieval fortresses. Beyond the clichés of watches and chocolate, Switzerland reveals its depth.

A nation of transitions

With four official languages and strong cantonal autonomy, there is no single Switzerland. Nor a single way to discover it. On this journey, we chose to avoid the big cities and focus on the south.

For two weeks we travelled on its famous trains: precise, elegant, silent. We added funiculars that climb mountains, cogwheel trains, and boats tracing routes along millenary shores. We discovered that Switzerland is understood through transitions: from one canton to another, from one language to the next, from snow to flowers, from silence to street fairs with live music. To understand Switzerland is to accept change as the rule, and contrast as its identity.

From Ticino to the line of glaciers

The route began near Lake Como, at the border between the canton of Ticino and the south of Graubünden, where we boarded the Bernina Express bound for St. Moritz.

The train climbs from Val Poschiavo, a green and Mediterranean region which, though fully Swiss, speaks Italian and lives at its own rhythm. Its agricultural terraces and gentle landscape contrast with the glacial world that opens up at altitude.

Crossing Ospizio Bernina (2,253 m) is not only the highest point of the route, but also a geographical threshold. Beside it, Lake Bianco—milky white from the minerals of the Palü glacier—contrasts with the darker Lake Nero, as if water itself spoke in different tones. Their colours tell a bifurcated story: the waters of the Bianco flow towards the Adriatic, while those of the Nero run to the Danube and the Black Sea. At this point, even the language shifts: we left Italian behind and entered the Romansh-speaking zone of Graubünden.

St. Moritz and luxury without belonging

In contrast with Italy, St. Moritz felt somewhat soulless. Perhaps because of the distance imposed by extreme luxury; perhaps because the snow season was ending. When belonging is measured through consumption, the place loses depth.

We preferred instead the image of the frozen lake yielding under the spring sun, and walking around it to see the mountains from every angle. It was a tactical pause: enough to observe without being absorbed.

The Glacier Express and history in motion

The following morning we boarded the Glacier Express, Switzerland’s most iconic train. For eight hours we did not simply cross the country: it was more than a journey, it was a display.

From the geometric void of the Rhine Gorge to the snow-covered Oberalp Pass where only the wind could be heard. In Disentis, the canton’s oldest monastery taught us that the word münster—familiar from Germany’s Black Forest—comes from the Latin monasterium: long before the Confederation there was life, frescoes, and onion-domed architecture.

In Trun the 14th-century peace treaty that gave birth to unified Switzerland was signed. In Andermatt, where trains, roads and tunnels converge, stands the Saint Gotthard Pass, the country’s backbone.

Every window of the train brought a new lesson: a typical dish (capuns), a 17-kilometre tunnel, an energy fact (60% of Swiss electricity comes from water, and nuclear plants will close in 2025). Each fact was not just information: it was part of the way Switzerland reveals itself. Everything had weight. Everything had form.

Zermatt: the alpine village par excellence

Arriving in Zermatt was entering another dimension. The Matterhorn, omnipresent, seemed to guard not only the Italian border, but also the skiers still enjoying a long season. Late snow had piled up more than five metres, a mantle that still descended the slopes.

We walked among ancient dark wooden houses with stone bases, not only in Zmutt but also in the village centre, where ancestral forms coexist with the technical sophistication of the present.

On the hikes towards Furi we passed through two hamlets where we learned that these 15th-century structures—mountain shelters for shepherds and peasants—were raised on pillars with round stones designed to block rodents. Their larch walls, blackened by time, remain firm; their stone-slab roofs protect the buildings through centuries.

A small museum on high-altitude farming taught us about rye, transhumance and the harsh life of those who lived here long before tourism. Switzerland was not always wealthy: it was, first, resilient.

The transport systems to the summits are feats of engineering that operate with almost invisible elegance. The modern, silent Matterhorn Glacier Paradise cableway took us up to 3,883 metres: the highest point in Europe accessible without climbing. From there, with temperatures below zero, we looked over more than thirty 4,000-metre peaks and fourteen glaciers stretching across Switzerland, Italy and France.

By contrast, the old cogwheel train to Gornergrat carried us to 3,089 metres. The view opened to new peaks and other faces of the Matterhorn. We had planned to stay two hours but spent the entire day. Not only for the imposing presence of the Matterhorn, but for the amphitheatre of glaciers unfolding around it.

Accumulated snow blocked the planned trails, but revealed another way of seeing the mountain: the silence of the Gorner glacier, extended like a tongue that cracked and groaned as it descended, demanded pause. We picnicked on a bench among the ice, while alpine choughs tried to steal our lunch. We listened to the wind filtering between the peaks: a silence that was not absence, but the full presence of place.

We also visited the mountaineers’ cemetery, where the dates of the first expeditions spoke of risk, skill and will. Fascinatingly, we learned that while the Swiss side has permanent life, the Italian side has no settlements, though it hosts a dense network of slopes, refuges and high-altitude restaurants. A mountain “empty” of villages is, in fact, intensely lived through sport.

We shared a local soup with skiers arriving from the other side. Advertised in German as “grandmother’s soup”, it was more than food: it was a meeting point, a shared gesture in a landscape crossed on skis or boots.

Vaud and the Swiss Riviera

From there we packed to cross into the canton of Vaud. It was more than a language change. Everything softened: the Lavaux terraces, paths lined with wildflowers—and others meticulously planted—, boats anchored before Art Nouveau villages.

In Les Avants we looked for daffodils; in Clarens we descended on foot through lime trees; and on Lake Geneva we sailed on a Belle Époque steamboat still propelled by its original oil machinery, like a floating museum. Glasses of local wine served in deckchairs on the upper deck made the journey unforgettable.

Montreux surprised us with its floral display. Tulips of every shape and colour, arranged with almost curatorial aesthetics, turned the lake promenade into a moving garden. Running there at dawn was revealing: I saw bulbs being changed, new aromas rising from aromatic beds, spring organised with method and care.

Higher up, on the slopes, we saw what the late snow had hidden in Zermatt: transhumance. Sheep and cows with bells ascending to fresh pastures marked the season with ancestral precision.

Lavaux was perhaps the perfect summary of Swiss contrast: vineyards cultivated for centuries where 98% of the wine is consumed domestically. A local jewel thriving thanks to three suns: the one in the sky, the reflection from the lake, and the heat the terraces’ stones release at dusk.

Everything seemed to obey a secret logic: the logic of care.

Borders, fortresses and the art of passage

Before becoming a tourist destination, Switzerland was a passage: a geography to cross, but also to defend. We visited castles such as Chillon, on Lake Geneva, and those of Bellinzona, whose fortified trio—Castelgrande, Montebello and Sasso Corbaro—speaks of a time when borders were not abstract lines but points of watch, toll and shelter.

In Bellinzona, their strategic arrangement follows a logic of surveillance dating back to Roman times, perfected in the 15th century by the Dukes of Milan—first the Visconti, then the Sforza.

Further west, Chillon Castle controlled traffic along the narrow path skirting cliffs between Vaud and Valais. It is no coincidence that nearby lies the Saint-Maurice Pass, a historic gateway to the upper Rhône Valley.

These fortresses remind us that the Alps are not only a natural barrier but also a network of strategic corridors. Switzerland is a land of passes: Gotthard, Bernina, Simplon, Oberalp. Paths once used by people, armies and goods—sometimes slowly, sometimes stealthily, sometimes with warrior spirit.

Today, where customs stood, there are platforms. Where there was control, there is crossing.

Lugano and Locarno: the south also exists

Back in Italian-speaking Switzerland, Lugano reminded us that the south also exists. We walked its main avenue, among elegant shops and noble façades, down to Parco Ciani, where benches face the water with serenity. We rented a boat and crossed beyond the Italian border: an unmarked frontier, visible in the tones of houses, the shape of hills, the music in the background.

We ended in Locarno, between a food-truck fair in Piazza Grande and the solemnity of the Santuario della Madonna del Sasso. Built after friar Bartolomeo Piatti claimed to see the Virgin on the rock in 1480, the sanctuary rises above a town that today combines baroque masses above with street food below. That simultaneity—between the elevated and the earthly, the Swiss and the Italian, the precise and the lived—was perhaps the best synthesis of the trip.

Valle Verzasca: a Switzerland without showcases

We closed the journey in Valle Verzasca, built around the emerald river that gives it its name. Its stone villages are spanned by the Ponte dei Salti, a medieval two-arched bridge at Lavertezzo that seems drawn from a tale.

On the hike to Sonogno waterfall we encountered sculptures carved in tree trunks: part of an artistic trail linking nature, culture and contemporary art with deep respect for the alpine surroundings. A more authentic farewell. More rural. A Switzerland without showcases.

Travelling through Switzerland is not following a straight line. It is accepting that countries are also narrated in layers: by trains, yes, but also by valleys; by impeccable infrastructure, from a punctual bus to a funicular floating among peaks; and by the way everything integrates into the rhythm of landscape.

Switzerland does not impose itself: it works with precision, but it is felt with wonder.

If this read made you want to travel at a slower pace—or to look differently at the world you already know—share it with someone who also appreciates slow rhythms, good trains and stories told in layers.

My itineraries are designed for that: to make you feel, be amazed, learn, and return with memories that cannot be bought.

If you are dreaming of your next journey, write to me.