Santiago Wills, journalist and philosopher, took part in the sixteenth session of the Planeta UAB lecture series, an initiative of the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación aimed at UAB master’s degree students.
This lecture series is part of the project “Planet UAB: The journey to the other – equals in differences” organised by the Gabinete during the academic year 2020-2021, with the support of the Fons de Solidaritat of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, which organised a series of activities and awareness-raising actions based on the concept of the UAB campus as a “planet” and which dealt with major issues such as the culture of peace, sustainability, the environment and interculturality, among others.
Students from the Master’s in Travel Journalism, the Master’s in Environmental Communication and the Master’s in Communication and Education participated in this sixteenth session with Santiago Wills, entitled ‘Palabra de jaguar. An invisible story‘. The journalist explained to the students his non-fiction book project ‘The shadow of the jaguar: capturing the spirit of America’, with which he won the Michael Jacobs travel chronicle grant 2021. In it, he writes a biography of the American feline based on a series of journeys through its historical and current habitats in Honduras, Colombia, Honduras and Brazil: “Emblem of darkness, beauty, the underworld, magic, power, death, the supernatural”. In the session, the philosopher narrated his travels through the historical habitats of Chiribiquete and La Lindosa (Colombia), where the oldest paintings in America are found, Ciudad Jaguar and the ruins of Copán (Honduras), where he explained his relationship with the Mayas and Aztecs, and Surinam and Pantanal (Brazil), one of the locations where the jaguar was trafficked to Asia.
Santiago Wills is a journalist. He studied Philosophy at the National University of Colombia and holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University in New York.
