The pictorial story of a Colombian settlement that was born when a group of 30 people escaped slavery in 1599. This publication explores the origins of the Colombian town of San Basilio de Palenque, founded in 1599 by a group of formerly enslaved people. Kalabongó traverses an oral and visual history of the distant and recent past, mixing the everyday with the historical. “Kalabongó” offers a captivating glimpse into the rich culture and historical significance of an African American slave community on the Colombian coast, which played a pivotal role in the historic 1605 treaty with the Spanish Crown. On a night in 1599, thirty people, women and enslaved men, fled from the houses that made up the walled city of Cartagena de Indias in their search for autonomy, territory, and freedom. People still remember that the maroons “flew” over the land in times of struggle, confronting Spanish troops and defending the fugitive settlers, who for years inhabited mobile hamlets. In 1605, after confrontations with the Crown, they were granted a year of peace, a treaty considered the first of its kind in what is now Colombia.The struggles waged by the maroons and that year of peace were the seed and the roots of what is now San Basilio de Palenque. Kalabongó (fireflies in the Palenquero language) travel through some of the stories of the oral history of both the distant and recent past in a narrative that mixes the everyday with the historical.The stories of the villagers, as well as the images that make up “Kalabongó”, remind us that the night is “the accomplice of the light of freedom”. 88 illustrations