Every Body on the Mountain: Accessibility as a Design Rule

Somewhere around day four of a hard training week, a lot of people discover accessibility for the first time. Quadriceps that will not obey on a descent. A knee that objects to steps. The specific, humbling experience of standing at the bottom of a slope you walked up easily on Monday and deciding, honestly, that you are not going up it today.

That is the argument in one paragraph. Accessibility is not a feature added for a category of visitor. It is a state most human beings pass through — after surgery, during pregnancy, with a sprained ankle, at seventy, or simply at six in the evening after a session that took everything. A place that only works for the strongest version of you works for you a surprisingly small fraction of the time.

Phoenix Oasis will occupy thirty hectares of hillside in Rivera, Huila. Hillsides are, by definition, the hardest possible case. Here is what designing for every body on terrain like that actually requires — and where the honest limits sit.

Accessible is not a category of person

International law has largely settled this framing. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted in 2006 and ratified by Colombia, treats accessibility as a precondition for participation rather than as a concession. Colombia's own Ley Estatutaria 1618 of 2013 puts the same principle into national law.

Designers reached the same conclusion by a different road. The classic example is the curb cut: the sloped dip at a street corner, fought for by disability activists in the United States in the 1970s, which turned out to serve parents with strollers, delivery workers, cyclists, travellers with suitcases and anyone carrying something heavy. The phrase for it is the curb-cut effect — build for the person with the hardest constraint, and you improve the experience for everyone.

On a retreat estate, the beneficiaries multiply. A path that a wheelchair can use is a path someone can walk at three in the morning without a torch. A handrail installed for balance is a handrail everyone grabs when it rains.

The numbers that govern a path

Accessible route design is unusually specific, and the specificity is the point — a path is either usable or it is not, and the difference is a few degrees.

• Gradient. Widely used international practice caps a ramp at roughly one in twelve, about eight per cent, and prefers something closer to one in twenty for any long run. Above that, self-propelling becomes exhausting and descending becomes dangerous.
• Landings. Every ramp run needs a flat resting platform. A continuous eight per cent slope with no level ground is a slope almost nobody can manage.
• Cross-fall. Paths need a slight sideways tilt to drain, but too much cross-fall constantly steers a wheelchair off line. Around two per cent is the usual limit.
• Width. Common standards allow about 900 mm for a single wheelchair to pass, around 1500 mm for a turning circle, and roughly 1800 mm for two people to pass comfortably.
• Surface. This is where tropical sites fail most often. Loose gravel is a wall. Compacted, stabilised surfaces that stay firm through heavy rain are the difference between a path and a decoration.

Rest is infrastructure

The least discussed element of accessible design is the bench. For anyone with limited stamina — cardiac, respiratory, arthritic, pregnant, recovering, or simply tired — the usable length of a route is not measured in metres but in the distance between places to sit down.

Good practice on accessible routes puts seating at regular intervals rather than at scenic viewpoints only. It sounds trivial. It decides whether half the estate exists for you. Shade belongs in the same category: on a tropical slope, an unshaded rest point in the middle of the afternoon is not a rest point at all.

Beyond wheels

Mobility is the visible part of accessibility and not the largest part.

• Sight. Contrast does more work than any sign. A step edge in a colour that reads clearly against the tread, handrails that stand out from the planting behind them, changes in surface texture at decision points — all of these are usable without instructions.
• Hearing. In an open-air setting, spoken instructions carry unevenly. Sessions that also show what they say, written schedules, and visual signals for anything urgent make a real difference.
• Sensory load. Predictable layouts, clear wayfinding, and somewhere to withdraw that is genuinely quiet matter enormously for autistic and neurodivergent guests — and, quietly, for everyone else at the end of a long day.
• Light. A route that is accessible at noon and unlit at nine at night is accessible for half the time.

The honest limit of a hillside

Here is where integrity is required. On thirty hectares of Andean slope, not every square metre can be step-free. A waterfall in a ravine is not going to have a ramp. Pretending otherwise is worse than admitting it.

The workable standard is different, and higher in a way: every core function should have an accessible route, and every signature experience should have an accessible equivalent. If there is water to be in, there should be water you can reach. If there is a place to watch the sun leave the valley, at least one such place should be reachable by anyone. And the information has to be published honestly — real gradients, real surfaces, real distances — so that people can make their own decisions instead of discovering the truth on arrival.

What the plan has to answer for here

The centre is due to open on 30 June 2028. Nothing on the estate is finished, which means the routes, the gradients and the surfaces are still questions on a drawing rather than concrete that has set. That is the only moment when accessibility is cheap; retrofitted later, it is expensive and always compromised.

The commitment worth making at this stage is not a promise that everything will be flat. It is a promise that the question will be asked about every path before it is cut, and answered honestly on the page before anyone books.

You can see what else is planned for the estate on the facilities page.