Jorge Alí Triana is the protagonist of the #130 edition of BOCAS Magazine.
38 years old, born in Bucaramanga, she is the eldest of three siblings: Andrés and Paula. The Bayona children did not go out to play every afternoon like the others, since they had reinforcement classes after school. Her mother, Ligia Baquero, is a Wayuu woman, with a degree in preschool education. Her father, Héctor Bayona, worked his entire life as a machinery contractor, a job that allowed him to travel the country and inspire his children.
Natalia has been called Mafalda since she was little. Not only because of the ribbon that tied her short, straight, and straight black hair, and because she had spoken perfectly since she was two years old –which is why she had to skip a class–, but because of the topics of conversation she raised when she was a child: she liked to do uncomfortable questions, read the newspaper that his father left on the table and question the elders. But unlike Quino’s character, Natalia not only likes soup, she loves it, especially if it’s made from plantain, minestrone or if it has shellfish.
Bayona is the executive director of the World Tourism Organization.
He studied International Relations at the Externado de Colombia University. When she left, she did an unpaid internship at the Foreign Ministry and was a teacher in public schools in the center of Bogotá. From there she jumped to ProColombia, where she worked for 10 years and where she entered the world of tourism. She was named the inaugural director of the commercial promotion offices in Argentina and was manager of tourism in Chile. There she was given for two consecutive years the award for the best government ally for her work in promoting Colombia. At 27, she became the youngest tourism manager this government agency has ever had.
Later he did an MBA at IE in Madrid, one of the best universities for business and management. She was appointed in the Spanish capital as vice president of the South Summit, a global forum for innovation and entrepreneurship, until she finally came to the World Tourism Organization, five years ago, as director of the Department of Innovation, then as director of Innovation, Investments and Education Projects. Today she is the executive director of the entire organization.
She is half guajira and half bumanguesa. He once passed out in a morgue and that’s how he discovered that medicine was not his thing. At the age of fifteen, he did not ask for a tour of Europe or a party, but an English course in Florida. He knows more than a hundred countries – he has just known 101 (Uzbekistan) and 102 (Mauritius) -. Two years ago he fell in love with a Spaniard with whom he crossed Spain on a motorcycle – something he had never done. They traveled 2,500 km together in the north of Spain, and for four months they have been the parents of a little baby named Miranda.
Natalia Bayona, during a tourism meeting.
At the age of 27, she became the tourism manager for Procolombia.
Natalia Bayona had been working at UNWTO for five years.
She was the inaugural director of the commercial promotion offices in Argentina and was a tourism advisor in Chile.
(We recommend another BOCAS interview: Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, told his story in BOCAS)
