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Join us in celebrating women’s leadership with these 8 women with a new vision for Earth.

At the age of 83, lawyer Ángela Dolmetsch has a vitality that many women her age would envy. 

In a hoarse voice, yet still showing her sharp mental agility, she proudly shares the story of a place she helped build in the early 2000s.

“Women manage the economy – or rather, mothers do,” she says.

This is Nashira, a matriarchal ecovillage located in Palmira, a short drive from the city of Cali in western Colombia.

This was the cradle of a pre-Columbian settlement known as Malagana, discovered 30 years ago in the same location where Nashira now stands some 2,000 years later.

On her phone screen, Dolmetsch shows me photos of her favorite Malagana sculpture: a woman giving birth, pregnant and breastfeeding. 

This shows, she explains, that matriarchy is rooted neither in the present nor in the future, but in the past – beneath the very land where more than 300 people now live in a system that enshrines gender equity and deep respect for nature.

The bottom line: matriarchy isn’t about utopia but honoring tradition. 

On that land stood a thriving society that valued fertility, nourishment and motherhood – and that still holds true today.

Nashira was created as a living experiment in another way of life: communal living, with women leading and owning homes in their own names, in a place that deeply respects nature.

Many of its residents had been displaced by Colombia’s long civil war and previously lived precariously in major cities across the country. In Nashira, they had homes of their own for the first time – many of them built with their own hands.

What is matriarchy?

Matriarchy is often viewed as the opposite of patriarchy, but it’s much deeper and more complex in reality.

Patriarchy is a system that promotes imperialism (the idea that nations can be subjugated by others), anthropocentrism (the belief that human beings are separate from nature) and misogyny (the belief in the superiority of men over women).

Matriarchy, on the other hand, challenges that logic and proposes a new vision.

Heide Göttner-Abendroth, a German researcher and pioneer of modern matriarchal studies, points to the roots of the word ‘matriarchy.’ For her, matriarchy means “in the beginning, the mothers.”

Matriarchies, she explains, are societies guided by a logic of care, respect for the importance of mothers, gender equity, decision making by consensus, a gift economy and a spirituality that sees divinities as immanent rather than as an external, omnipotent male god.

That means deep respect for external nature in a world connected to care and devoted to all forms of life.

Göttner-Abendroth argues that matriarchies have already existed in all corners of the globe and were in fact the norm until the rise of patriarchy around 6,000 years ago.

Some have endured to this day, such as the Mosuo in China, the Uros on the Peruvian shores of Lake Titicaca and the Wayuu along the Colombian–Venezuelan border.

Nashira emerged under these principles of gender equity, the gift economy and spirituality connected to the environment.

How the Nashira ecovillage works

The founding of Nashira dates back to archeological remains discovered on a sugarcane farm in San Isidro, Palmira, 1992.

Dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the site showed evidence of a matriarchal society and was named Malagana after the farm where the first objects were unearthed.

Among the artifacts found was a statue representing a woman giving birth, pregnant and breastfeeding – a powerful symbol that would inspire the creation of the ecovillage 20 years later.

Dolmetsch came up with the idea while working with women heads of household living precariously in Cali, a city known as the world capital of salsa and host of the Biodiversity COP16 in 2024.

The project aimed to provide homes for these women, expanding after the Colombian government launched a program supporting women in situations of social vulnerability.

After many bureaucratic obstacles, Dolmetsch learned of land for sale in Palmira and managed to negotiate its purchase for COP 130 million (around USD 35,000). 

She secured funds to buy the land and build the first 39 houses by matching funds from Palmira’s mayor’s office and the government of the department of Valle del Cauca.

The first houses were completed in 2007, with women contributing their own labor in exchange for a discount on their homes. The houses were built using panels made from rubble and ecological bricks.

The remaining 41 houses were then built with public funding in the 2010s, without requiring financial contributions from their future occupants.

“The philosophy is that resources must flow where they are needed,” Dolmetsch says.

“We are a community with open doors,” she adds, noting that part of the women’s income is derived from visitors who want to learn about the project.

There is also a community restaurant funded by the local government that prepares about 50 meals a day. People pay what they want and can for their meals, and those who cannot afford to contribute receive them for free.

“The women own their homes, but the productive areas are communal,” Dolmetsch explains.

The residents derive their income from a variety of sources, including raising chickens, ducks and fighting roosters, cultivating moringa, vegetable gardens and greenhouse crops. The village’s most profitable business is a solar-powered recycling plant.

“In Nashira, we began with women’s empowerment,” says Dolmetsch. “That means women own their homes and decide who enters their houses and their bodies.”

“For them, this was completely different from what they were used to, because they began owning their homes, and their children grew up in a different environment, where they were able to receive an education.”

Lives transformed in Nashira

Bárbara Orjuela Vargas, 53, recalls living with her two children in a school gymnasium in Palmira. She worked there during the day and, in exchange, was allowed to stay at night.

When she heard about the construction of a matriarchal ecovillage, she saw an opportunity to change her life. She now works at the recycling plant, helped by her mother, Amparo Vargas, who also lives in the ecovillage.

Alongside another partner, they collect waste throughout the district of Bolo, in Palmira, and work with paper, glass and metal.

“When we arrived here in Nashira, we used to joke that we were rich now – we were no longer poor,” Orjuela recalls, wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘environmental recycler’ across the back.

Nashira’s administration is carried out by a board of directors made up of 20 people who make decisions by consensus, following matriarchal principles.

The current board consists of 19 women and just one man, Sneyder Neira – admitted because he was raised in the ecovillage under matriarchal principles.

Neira’s mother, Rocío Lizcano, holds a degree in nursing and works with moringa trees, a medicinal plant that she grinds and transforms into products such as flour. She also produces and sells other natural goods, such as repellents.

She and her family helped build the first houses – including that of her parents, who had been displaced by the armed conflict.

Lizcano and her family were among the second cohort to move into Nashira. Today, she lives there with her husband, Henry Neira, and two adult children. They also have a daughter who now lives in Peru.

“What I like most is that we can come together to carry out a dream,” Lizcano says. She is part of the ecovillage’s health committee and helps neighbors with health-related issues when needed.

Art also features in daily life in Nashira. Enedie Rojas, 70, coordinates the ecovillage’s ceramics workshop, where she has been crafting and teaching other women for more than a decade. 

Gentle and calm, she pauses to observe birds and flowers as she walks through the ecovillage. She voluntarily sweeps some of the community’s streets when she has time.

“I like everything to be clean,” she explains. “I love Nashira very much.”

Rojas used to work at a pet shop in Cali before moving to Nashira, which has completely transformed her life.

“My financial life has changed. I have peace now, and I feel happy in everything because I can create a figure from clay,” she says.

“It has changed me completely, because you must always have enough merchandise, since people arrive at any time. Last November, they took everything I painted.”

When she first arrived, she relied on the generosity of a neighbor who gave her everything she needed to start her new life because she had arrived with nothing, “not even a spoon.”

“My neighbor gave me everything – spoons, cutlery, a TV – and so I stayed,” she says calmly.

“It’s much more peaceful here. I would never trade Nashira for Cali again.”

Can we replicate matriarchal ecovillages around the world?

Projects like Nashira and other ancestral cultures that are still alive around the world demonstrate that matriarchy isn’t just a utopian ideal but already being practiced.

But could we replicate this matriarchal ecovillage model in other parts of the globe? 

For Kenyan researcher Nyakio Kaniu-Lake, the answer is an emphatic yes.

Kaniu-Lake has a background in mental health and is the founder of Agatha Amani House, a shelter for women and children who are victims of abuse in Kenya.

She traveled to Nashira last year to take part in an intensive course on matriarchy alongside 30 other women. Her goal now is to create her own matriarchal ecovillage back in Kenya.

“When I learned about matriarchy, I understood this was the missing piece of my project,” she says.

The shelter is built on land that belonged to Kaniu-Lake’s own mother – herself a survivor of abuse – in the Naivasha region. It already applies the principles of permaculture, which Kaniu-Lake describes as a “tipping point” in her life. 

Unlike Nashira, however, the women at the shelter only live there temporarily. Kaniu-Lake is now considering building tents that could evolve into more permanent houses.

For her, the challenge of implementing matriarchy lies in navigating a world still built on patriarchal foundations, such as governments, banks and other institutions.

Dolmetsch agrees: “we want this and we try to make it happen, but when you say that women are the ones making decisions, it’s not easy for patriarchy to accept.”

“You step out and the world is still patriarchal,” says Kaniu-Lake. “But matriarchy is the solution to wars, to famine, to hunger, to abuse – to everything.”