Lucio Chiquito Caicedo, one of the engineers behind Medellin's public utility empire, has died at 110 — leaving behind a career that stretched across nearly eight decades and, improbably, a doctoral thesis finished at age 104.
Chiquito Caicedo co-founded Empresas Publicas de Medellin (EPM), the utility created in 1955 that merged four separate services — electricity, water, sewage and telephones — into a single company that now supplies power, gas, drinking water and sanitation across much of Colombia. EPM's general manager Jhon Maya paid tribute after his death on November 13, 2026, calling him a benchmark for engineering in Antioquia and the country.
Born story: after a civil engineering degree from the National University of Colombia in Medellin in 1941, a British Council scholarship took him to wartime England, where he earned a master's in hydraulics from the University of Manchester in 1947. Back home he worked on the Anchicaya hydroelectric project in Valle del Cauca, then led engineering on Medellin's Piedras Blancas reservoir and helped set up a hydrology service mapping water sources across Antioquia — groundwork that fed directly into EPM's creation.
He didn't stop at utilities. He co-founded engineering consultancies Integral S.A. (1955) and Sedic S.A. (1971), helped establish the construction industry association Camacol in 1957, and was part of the group that founded the School of Engineering of Antioquia, now Universidad EIA, in 1978. Colombia awarded him the Order of Merit Don Juan del Corral in 2016 and the Escudo de Antioquia in 2023.
The detail that turned him into a national curiosity came late. Titled "The Optimal Point in the Use of a River's Water," his doctoral thesis tackled a stubborn hydraulic engineering problem: calculating exactly how much water can be drawn from a river for power generation and irrigation without waste. He analysed eight rivers, including the Cauca and Sogamoso, and worked on it on and off for about 30 years before the pandemic lockdowns gave him the focus to finish — a disciplined daily routine, roughly 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. He emailed the manuscript to the University of Manchester on September 23, 2020, at age 104, some 73 years after his master's degree.
Family members credited his sharpness to constant goals: articles, languages, technical problems. He married Ofelia Ramirez Jaramillo in 1948; the marriage lasted 67 years until her death in 2015, and produced six children, 12 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. He walked daily from age 22 to 98.
Why should travellers care? Medellin's reliable water, power and the hillside cable cars and public spaces visitors enjoy today rest on the institutions men like Chiquito Caicedo built. His story is a window into how a once-turbulent city engineered its way to the reputation as one of South America's most innovative — a backstory worth knowing before you ride the Metrocable or visit the EPM water museum in Plaza de los Deseos.
Colombia One
