Camello and Camellar: Why Colombians Call Their Job a Camel
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Ask a Colombian what they do and they may tell you about their camello. There is no animal involved. They mean their job.
It is one of those words that makes perfect sense the second you see the picture behind it, and no sense at all before that.
The short answer
Camello means work or a job in Colombian Spanish, and camellar means to work, usually hard. Estoy camellando means I'm working, I'm grafting.
How it is actually used
| Colombian Spanish | English |
|---|---|
| Estoy camellando | I'm working, I'm at work |
| Conseguí camello | I got a job |
| Estoy sin camello | I'm out of work |
| Ese camello está duro | That job is tough going |
| Toca camellar duro | You've got to graft |
| Un camellito | a little gig, a side job |
¿Y qué ha hecho?
Nada, camellando. Ahí vamos.What have you been up to? / Nothing much, working. Getting by.
Two things worth noticing. First, camello covers both the abstract (work) and the concrete (a specific job or gig), where English needs two words. Second, it carries effort in it. Camellar is never light work. Somebody doing an easy job would not reach for this verb.
Where it comes from
The image is the animal, and it is doing exactly the job you would expect.
A camel is the beast of burden par excellence: it carries heavy loads, over long distances, without complaint. Spanish put that picture directly onto human labour, and camellar became to haul, to graft, to keep going under weight. The Diccionario de americanismos records the usage across Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras.
There is no documented single moment of origin, and any article that gives you one is inventing it. What there is instead is a very old and very common pattern: languages describe hard human work by naming the animal that does it. Spain has currar and English has "donkey work". Colombia picked the camel.
The mistake to avoid
In Spain and much of Latin America, camello also means a small-time drug dealer, the one who "carries". In Colombia this second sense exists too but the work sense dominates so completely that context clears it up instantly. Outside Colombia it does not, so saying estoy camellando in Madrid will get you a very different look.
Elsewhere
Spain says currar and curro. Mexico says chambear and chamba. Argentina says laburar and laburo, from Italian lavoro. All four do exactly the same job as camellar, and all four are the kind of word you have to know because nobody says trabajar in relaxed conversation.
More Colombian vocabulary in what hágale really means, cucho and cucha and our 50 essential Colombian Spanish expressions.
Talk about work the way Colombians do
Camellar is the kind of word that separates textbook Spanish from a real conversation about someone's day. Our Colombian Spanish Phrasebook gathers 200 of them, sorted by situation, with examples, cultural notes and pronunciation guidance.
Quick recap
- Camello: work, or a specific job or gig.
- Camellar: to work hard, to graft. Camellando is the form you will hear most.
- Origin: the camel as beast of burden, the same logic as English "donkey work".
- Careful: outside Colombia camello more often means a small-time dealer.
- Equivalents: currar in Spain, chambear in Mexico, laburar in Argentina.