Long before its identification as Colombia's río patria in 1919 and prior to its colonial baptism as Río Grande de la Magdalena in April 1501, the Río Magdalena, modern Colombia's principal waterway, was central to diverse cosmologies and went by many names: Guaca-Hayo (“river of tombs”), Yuma (“river of the country of the friend”), Arlí or Arbí (“river of fish”), Karacalí (“river of caimans”), and Karihuana (“large water”). Indeed, as it wound its way from the high páramos in the south and between the central and eastern cordilleras of the Andes in its middle reaches, before spilling its waters over its swampy delta and into the Caribbean Sea, it facilitated contact and commerce between diverse pre-Hispanic cultures. Now many of these have been erased in all but name because of war and disease in the Colonial Period, the colonization and redistribution of lands aimed at securing agricultural exports in the nineteenth century, and a constantly evolving set of political conflicts that date back at least as far as the Violencia of the 1940s and 1950s. Thus the Magdalena basin, which covers 23 percent of Colombia's surface area, now contains 80 percent of Colombia's predominantly mestizo population and is where 85 percent of its economic activity takes place. Although it has lost its historic role as the nation's principal axis of communication and gateway to the Atlantic world, it nonetheless continues to connect (albeit in a spectral fashion) the distinct regions of what in many accounts is a highly fragmented nation.

In his Elegías de ilustres varones (158, the chronicler Juan de Castellanos wrote that “con innumerable tinta/No se podrá decir la parte quinta” of the horrors endured during Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada's first expedition up the river. Advancing slowly up its densely forested course, Jiménez's men find only “Montaña tenebrosa y asombrada.” Romantic scientists like Alexander von Humboldt, Francisco José Caldas, and José Celestino Mutis would later supplant the terms of this Spanish colonial “heart of darkness” with an emphasis on the sublime beauty and abundance of its shores – tropes forged and negotiated in the “planetary consciousness” of imperial science. Yet even after the consolidation of steam travel in the mid–nineteenth century, travel on its waters remained arduous.