Cumbia The rhythm of Colombia

Desire and hope, love and suffer, happiness und unhappiness, that all combines one of the most popular and traditional dance in Colombia: Cumbia. The couple dance is related to salsa, the most common dance in South America. Love stories were always part of salsa and during the centuries cumbia had focused on that aspect. However, you can describe cumbia as a erotic dancing where a guy wants to get in touch with a woman. During the dancing the guy leads the woman with just one hand and at the same time the woman is twisting. All in all, an impressive choreography.

Originally, cumbia was a round dance from Africa. During the colonial area african slaves brought the dance to the Carribean coast of Colombia. In fact, cumbia combines African, Indian and Spanish dance elements. Cumbia comes from the African word cum bé, which means move to drums. Primarily, just flutes and percussion instruments were used when dancing cumbia. Later, people started to sing.

In the 90s cumbia was rediscovered by a young generation of music lovers. Afterwards they created new musical flows of cumbia. Nowadays, cumbia reggae or cumbia elctronic are quite popular all over the world. Still Colombia is the centre of the cumbia music culture. Every year the town of El Banco in the north of Colombia celebrates the cumbia festival. There you find the true passion and rhytm of Colombia