A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia on Monday morning, with the epicentral area near San José del Palmar in Chocó department. President Abelardo de la Espriella said at least 111 people had died, and the number remained provisional while rescue teams continued searching. Authorities and local reports counted roughly 1,600 damaged or collapsed buildings across the affected region. At least 111 people were confirmed dead while rescuers worked across western cities and towns and thousands of missing-person reports remained unresolved.
Strong shaking was reported in Cali, Quibdó, Pereira, Manizales and numerous smaller communities, and was felt beyond Colombia. Soldiers, emergency workers and residents removed concrete by hand in places where heavy equipment could not immediately reach survivors. Citizen-run missing-person databases contained more than 2,700 reports by Monday night, but those entries were not equivalent to verified casualties. Chocó contains remote communities with limited road access, so damage and casualty verification can lag behind reports from larger cities.
The national government declared a disaster response as hospitals, roads, utilities and housing were assessed. Aftershocks continued after the main shock, complicating work around unstable structures and increasing the need for controlled access. Early disaster totals combine official confirmations with incomplete local assessments and normally change as duplicate missing-person reports are reconciled. A building-damage count does not distinguish minor cracking from total collapse unless inspectors publish a more detailed classification.
The earthquake was described by Colombia’s geological authorities as the country’s strongest recorded event of this century. A powerful earthquake centered near San José del Palmar damaged or destroyed roughly 1,600 buildings and began a large, still-fluid search-and-rescue operation across western Colombia. The source record distinguishes verified observations and published data from attributed institutional or political claims; where a source described a claim rather than independently proving it, this account preserves that attribution.
The edition deadline arrived while rescue work was active; the death, injury, missing-person and building totals were all subject to revision. The next dated evidence to compare is official reconciled casualty and missing-person totals, followed by hospital capacity, road access and structural inspection results. Those records will show which preliminary details hold, which totals change and which announced actions become operational.