'My mum was raised by monkeys - now I've quit life in city to live in jungle'

01 January 2024 , 22:42

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Vanessa Forero was just seven when she realised her mum was very different to anyone else’s.

Whenever the final bell rang at her primary school, the children would dash out to find their parents gossiping at the gates. But not Vanessa’s mum. She would usually be blowing a whistle and waving from the branches of a tree she had just climbed. “I knew other mums didn’t do that,” Vanessa recalls. “But that was just mum. My playful mum.

“She loved the outdoors, creating obstacle courses in the back garden, making monkey noises, climbing trees. Our pets were animals that my mum caught for us – we had a couple of wild rabbits that eventually escaped and a seagull.” It all sounds rather bizarre for a family in Bradford. But that’s not the half of it. Vanessa’s mum is Marina Chapman – a housewife who was born in Colombia, kidnapped aged four by trafficking gangs and abandoned in the rainforest where she claimed she was raised by monkeys. White-faced capuchins to be precise. Aged 10 she was found by hunters and sold to a brothel before being thrown out for being too feral.

'My mum was raised by monkeys - now I've quit life in city to live in jungle' eiqrqiediqkkinv

Marina loved making monkey noises and climbing trees in the family back garden

'My mum was raised by monkeys - now I've quit life in city to live in jungle'

Marina was kidnapped when she was just four years old and lived in the jungles of Colombia, where she claims to have been raised by monkeys

Years later, on a trip to the UK, Marina fell in love with a man she met in church. They would go on to get married and have two daughters Vanessa, now 40, and Joanna, 43. The only sign of Marina’s past was her unconventional approach to the school run. And the bizarre family story had a final twist. After the end of her own 15-year marriage, Vanessa left the UK to set up home in the same type of Colombian jungle where Marina claimed to have lived like a female Tarzan.

Not even the most creative types in Hollywood could have dreamt up this saga. Speaking from her remote lodge in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Vanessa feels she is finally where she belongs. She says: “I always decorated my room at home with images of nature and mountains.

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A Capuchin monkey on Colombia's Gorgona Island (Getty Images/LatinContent RF)

“My cousin would laugh at me and say I wanted to run off into the jungle. And now she’s like, ‘Oh my God, you actually did’. “Mum doesn’t like that I’m here – and so far away from her. But at the same time, she can see why I am here. This is the first time I’ve felt a feeling of home and belonging. And the monkeys do come around. They howl a lot in the trees. They are really loud. I’ve also got a big cat somewhere.

“Joanna came out more like Dad. She works as a civil servant, married with three kids living in Leeds. I was like Mum – born with jungle feet and twigs in my hair.” Her journey features in the new series of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, starting on Channel 5 tonight.

But, of course, it starts with Marina, now 73, who told her own story in 2013 book The Girl With No Name. She claims she was snatched in 1954, when child-trafficking gangs were commonplace in Colombia. “I saw a hand cover my mouth – a black hand in a white hanky,” Marina previously said. “Then I realised there were two people taking me away.” For reasons that are unclear she was later dumped in the rainforest.

Vanessa appeared on Ben Fogle's series New Lives in the Wild which starts tomorrow on Ch5 at 9pm

After around two days she says she saw a troop of capuchins and began copying them to survive. She would watch which nuts and berries they ate, catch bananas they dropped and drink from their watering holes. Eventually – as she began to walk on all fours and stopped talking – the monkeys began to accept her.

She says: “One day one of the younger ones landed on my shoulders and, if you’ve never been hugged and this animal puts their hands on your face, I tell you it’s the nicest touch.” She was there for around five years until she was found by hunters.

“One day, the regular cacophony was pierced by an immediate-danger call from one of the monkeys”, she wrote in her book. “The [hunters’] nets, I realised as I watched, were for catching and stealing whatever creatures they fancied.” She claims the hunters took her to a brothel in Cucuta and that she later became a street child before eventually finding employment as a maid.

By her late teens she was working in capital city Bogota and accompanied the family she was working for on that life-changing trip to the UK. When Marina’s book was published, it was met with scepticism. Some suggested she was a fantasist, others that her brain was making false memories due to childhood trauma.

But Vanessa is confident it’s all true. She says: “Various tests have been done to determine whether my mum really was in the jungle, because obviously many people are sceptical. I would be too if she wasn’t my mum. They found Mum has strange jungle diseases lying dormant in her blood that she couldn’t possibly have if her story wasn’t true.”

Now the former TV jingle composer is reliving some of her mum’s experiences, albeit in far nicer surroundings. She had been to Colombia a few times with Marina and decided to take a trip while she waited to complete the purchase of a new flat following the end of her marriage. She and a friend travelled across the country ending up in Minca, a tiny mountain town, nestled in the jungle.

But then came Covid lockdowns, forcing her to stay. “That’s when I got a call to say the flat had fallen through,” she says. “I was told I was probably not going to get another mortgage because my income was unpredictable.” So Vanessa asked herself: “Where do I want to be at 60?” The answer? Right where she was. She spent three years building her home but, unlike her mum, Vanessa doesn’t have to forage for nuts. She even has wi-fi.

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She grows crops and eats bananas, passion fruit and guava for breakfast. While she has access to the best coffee in the world – she also has a big supply of Yorkshire Tea. “It really is the best of both worlds,” Vanessa laughs. The stifling heat is not so easy. She says: “I never liked summertime in Bradford never mind the tropics.”

As for Marina, she initially feared her daughter was making a mistake. “I felt uneasy at first because I never felt Colombia’s easy… or safe,” she tells Ben. “But I’m not worried anymore. She won’t get in a mess. She’s smart and I’m very proud of her.”