Centro Las Gaviotas is an ecovillage located in the Llanos region of Colombia, in the department of Vichada. It was founded in 1971 by Paolo Lugari, who assembled a group of engineers and scientists in an attempt to create alternative and sustainable modes of living that were specifically adapted to the tropics in developing nations. Gaviotas has developed many internationally recognized technologies such as windmills and water pumps specifically designed to be low cost and adapted to tropical environments, it has also planted around 10,000 hectares of forest that have allowed hundreds of native plant and animal species to thrive in a harsh environment from where forests have long receded.

Their terraformation of the llanos allows Las Gaviotas to thrive, but it is not an example of low impact ecology practised by many eco-villages. Las Gaviotas is largely apolitical, a strategy which has allowed it to grow amidst the cocaine growers, paramilitary organizations, insurgent guerrilla groups, and military troops present in the Llanos. The village is further separated from many eco-anarchist movements because of its early ties to the United Nations and the Colombian government.

Paolo Lugari first saw the Colombian Llanos in 1966 when his uncle, Tomás Castrillón, who was the minister of Public Works at the time, took him on an inspection flight to the Llanos. Paolo was captivated by the seemingly empty landscape and soon after travelled to Vichada by car with his brother. After days of travel they found a couple of deserted buildings from the abandoned construction of a highway through the Llanos. Lugari chose this place to start a community, he staked 10,000 hectares around the abandoned buildings and started a non-profit called El Centro las Gaviotas. The day the brothers arrived they saw river gulls (gaviotas in Spanish) and chose this as the name for the project.

Lugari envisioned Gaviotas as a laboratory for a tropical civilization. Lugari theorized that in order to accommodate Colombia's growing population, people would either have to settle the Amazon or Chocó regions, destroying some of the richest rainforest in the planet as was already happening in the Andean regions of Colombia. So Lugari wanted to see if the Llanos could be made inhabitable while rejecting reliance on technology and knowledge from distant, temperate places like the United States and Europe. The Llanos were very sparsely populated apart from Guahibo peoples and refugees from La Violencia, which for Lugari made the region ideal testing ground for a new tropical way of living.

Lugari started bringing academics and engineers to Gaviotas such as Sven Zethelius to get involved with the project. In 1970, Sven Zethelius, the son of a Swedish immigrant to Colombia, told Lugari about the greenhouse gas effect and the rapid loss of biodiversity across the entire planet. He encouraged Lugari to create an alternative way of living, a bio-system, in harmony with nature if he was serious about settling the Llanos. Gaviotas started bringing many university students to experiment and design new technologies that could be used in the harsh environment of the Llanos. Different water pumps, soil cement, windmills or any kind of device that could help people and be adapted to local conditions were encouraged. Most students came from Universidad de Los Andes and Universidad Nacional, and many Peace Corps volunteers from the US also spent time in Gaviotas in the early days, but gradually left.

In the first years, the population of Gaviotas was of 20 people, many Guahibo people helped build houses and hammocks. The Guahibo asked for a school, and Lugari was able to build the school and also bring nurses regularly to Gaviotas. Given the oil embargo of 1973, Gaviotas gained notoriety for their methodologies focused on the use of renewable energy. Many journalists came to visit the community as well as a delegation from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The UNDP declared Gaviotas a model community and started providing funding, which helped Gaviotas continue to develop technology and employ people. By the late 1970s, Gaviotas had grown to around 200 people, and a visit from the UNDP in 1979 secured a new round of funding after the delegates saw the impressive water pump and windmill technology Gaviotas had developed.

However, also in the late 1970s, Colombia's internal conflict was intensifying and insurgent groups started taking over the Llanos in and around Gaviotas. Insurgent groups set up roadblocks and charged protection money to locals. On several occasions, Gaviotas was papered with FARC leaflets and FARC insurgents forced Gaviotans to gather for indoctrination. The community chose to remain neutral and banned weapons from Gaviotas. It became generally known that Gaviotas was neutral and their staff were generally respected as they travelled across the region. Both the military and insurgent armed groups used Gaviotas for operations, usually without community consent, and Gaviotas' all-solar hospital was used by both wounded military and insurgent soldiers, sometimes being treated side by side.

A new hospital was built in the mid 1980s that needed no air conditioning and fully ran on solar energy. Not photovoltaic solar energy since the technology was prohibitively expensive at the time, but different forms of solar technology like convection solar heaters to sterilize water. The local Guahibo had been important partners in developing Gaviotas and used the old hospital regularly, but they considered being locked indoors away from family to be the opposite of healing, so a separate wing was added to the hospital. Local Guahibos designed and built themselves a Gahibo maloca where patients could sleep in hammocks and have their relatives stay with them.