Building in Jamundí: growth, land and the rules

Jamundí is today the most active destination for residential expansion in the south of the Valle del Cauca, and at the same time one of the municipalities where most people buy a plot without knowing what they are buying.

The reason is not that the rules are strange. It is that the municipality grew faster than its instruments, and that produces three conditions worth understanding before signing anything.

Jamundí is no longer measured on its own

There is one official fact that describes the situation better than any adjective, and that hardly anybody uses: the "Cali AU" statistical domain of DANE, the national statistics office — the urban area of Cali for the purposes of its construction indices — is made up of Cali, Jamundí, Palmira and Yumbo.

That is: for the official statistics on construction costs, Jamundí is not a municipality apart from the Valle. It is part of the urban area of Cali. Anybody building there competes for the same materials, the same labour and the same suppliers as anybody building in Cali, and their costs move with the same indices.

A land-use plan from 2002

The plan básico de ordenamiento territorial that governs Jamundí — its basic land-use plan — was adopted in 2002. More than two decades governing a territory that changed scale in that time.

That does not make it invalid — a land-use plan governs until it is reviewed and another is adopted — but it does have concrete consequences for anybody designing:

• —The mapping is old. Locating a property on it and deciding which polygon it falls into may call for a prior clarification that appears in no published timescale.
• —The categories may not reflect what has been built. There are zones that on paper are still one thing and have been another on the ground for years.
• —Every future review is a risk to the rules. If the land-use plan is reviewed while you are designing, the project is resolved under the rules in force on the day you file the permit application. Only filing freezes the rules; the written ruling on the planning rules does not.

The land: three classes, three different answers

A good part of the plots on offer in Jamundí are not on urban land. And the class of land is not a label: it decides whether the plot can be built on today, in some years’ time, or never.

On rural land in Jamundí there also applies the limit that voids deeds: save for the four exceptions in article 45 of Ley 160, rural properties may not be divided below the Unidad Agrícola Familiar, on pain of absolute nullity of the act or contract. It is not a fine; it is that the transaction never existed. The exceptions are in buying a rural plot.

Who issues the permit, and what it costs

Jamundí has no appointed curador urbano — the private office licensed by the state to issue permits. Where there is no curador, the competence sits with the municipal authority: in Jamundí, the Secretaría de Planeación y Coordinación Municipal. And that has a direct economic effect:

In Cali the curaduría charges are a fixed charge paid on filing plus a variable charge by area. In Jamundí that entire line item is zero. It does not make the procedure free: one component of the cost is missing, not all of them.

What really conditions it: water

And here is what really decides whether a project in Jamundí goes ahead, and it has nothing to do with the land-use plan or with money.

Out of an environmental class action came Sentencia 125 de 2021 of the Juzgado Segundo Administrativo Oral de Cali, confirmed by the Tribunal Administrativo del Valle in December 2022. It is a judgment on the merits, not an interim measure:

Read the test carefully, because it is what hardly anybody explains properly: the filter is not geographical, it is about utilities. There are no forbidden districts. What decides is whether the property has guaranteed supply, and that is proved with the certificate of availability.

The exceptions the judgment itself left open include:

• —Projects already approved with services guaranteed.
• —Strengthening, modification, extension, adaptation to another use and enclosure of existing buildings. If your project is on what is already built, this covers you.
• —Urban subdivision and construction with services guaranteed.
• —Parcelación with availability guaranteed. On rural land a treatment plant of your own has to be evidenced.
• —Works of general interest in health and education.

That the suspension exists does not mean nothing is being permitted. In the second quarter of 2025 the Secretaría de Planeación granted 76 planning permits, according to the report the municipality itself submitted to the court. It means that the certificate of availability is the first document to get hold of, before commissioning a drawing.

How it all reads together

The three facts point the same way. DANE already counts Jamundí inside the urban area of Cali. The land-use plan that governs it is from 2002. And a judge had to suspend permits because the water infrastructure did not keep up with the growth.

Jamundí grew faster than its instruments. That is not an argument for not building there: it is the explanation of why checking beforehand matters more than it does in other municipalities.

What to do, in order

1. 1Get the certificate of service availability. Before the drawing, before the budget, before signing the promise of sale. It is what decides whether the property can be permitted today.
2. 2Check the class of land. If it is expansion land with no partial plan adopted, nothing gets built today.
3. 3If it is rural, check the Unidad Agrícola Familiar and where the property came from.
4. 4Ask for the written ruling on the planning rules and the certificado de tradición, and read both right through. The betterment levy assessment, if there is one, is recorded on the folio.
5. 5Budget the 2% delineation tax on area times reference value, and do not count on construction costs any different from those in Cali.
6. 6File with the complete file. The 45 working days do not start running until the application is in legal and due form, and only filing freezes the rules.

All of the above is verified against rules and official documents as at the date of publication. Procedures change, and the absence of a curaduría in particular is a present condition, not a permanent feature of the municipality.