Colombia

The Muisca of the Bogotá highlands ran a confederation of chiefdoms trading salt, emeralds and cotton. Their ritual of a gilded ruler offering gold at Lake Guatavita became the El Dorado legend; the Muisca raft in the Museo del Oro shows the ceremony. On the Caribbean side, the Tayrona built stone terrace towns in the Sierra Nevada, including Ciudad Perdida, around 800 CE.

Spain founded Santa Marta (1525), Cartagena (1533) and Santafé de Bogotá (1538). Cartagena became the main port for silver and for enslaved Africans; its walls and forts were built after repeated attacks by English and French fleets. The Viceroyalty of New Granada was centred on Bogotá from 1717.

Independence began in 1810, was reversed by Spanish reconquest and was won by Simón Bolívar at the Battle of Boyacá in 1819. Gran Colombia, which included Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, broke up by 1831. The 19th century brought repeated civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives, ending with the Thousand Days' War (1899–1902) and the loss of Panama in 1903.

The assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá in 1948 set off the Bogotazo riot and La Violencia, a decade of partisan killing that left around 200,000 dead. A power-sharing pact ended it but excluded others, and in 1964 the FARC and the ELN emerged as guerrilla movements.

From the 1970s cocaine money transformed the war. The Medellín cartel under Pablo Escobar waged a bombing campaign against the state until his death in 1993; paramilitary groups fought the guerrillas and killed civilians; millions were displaced. The 'false positives' scandal revealed soldiers had killed civilians and presented them as guerrillas.

The 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, which earned President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize, disarmed some 13,000 fighters. But dissident FARC factions, the ELN and the Clan del Golfo still fight over drug routes and mining in border and Pacific regions, which is why official advice lists specific departments.

Colombians often identify first by region: rolos in Bogotá, paisas in Antioquia and the Coffee Region, costeños on the Caribbean, caleños in Cali, pastusos in the south. Accents, food and even politeness change between them.

Afro-Colombians are about a tenth of the population (check), concentrated on the Pacific coast and in Caribbean towns. San Basilio de Palenque, founded by escaped slaves in the 17th century, keeps a Spanish-based Creole language and is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

About 115 Indigenous peoples live mainly in La Guajira (Wayuu), the Sierra Nevada (Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa, Kankuamo), Cauca (Nasa, Misak) and the Amazon. The Sierra Nevada peoples see their mountain as the heart of the world and control access to sacred sites.

Since 2015 about 2.8 million Venezuelans have settled in Colombia, the largest share of the exodus (check).

Colombian cooking is regional and filling. Bogotá's ajiaco is a chicken soup thickened with three kinds of potato; Antioquia's bandeja paisa piles beans, pork and eggs on one plate; the Caribbean eats fried fish, coconut rice and fried arepas with eggs inside.

The arepa unites the country but changes shape: thin and plain in Antioquia, sweet with cheese in Boyacá, fried on the coast. Lunch is usually a menú del día of soup, main and fresh juice made from lulo, maracuyá or guanábana.

Coffee arrived in the 18th century and became a smallholder crop in Caldas, Quindío and Risaralda; the Coffee Cultural Landscape is a UNESCO site. The national coffee federation's Juan Valdez character, created in 1958, sold the idea of mountain-grown coffee abroad.

The Andes split into three ranges in Colombia, with the Magdalena and Cauca rivers flowing north between them. That relief creates every climate from snow peaks to tropical coasts within a day's travel, and explains why roads are slow.

Colombia records more bird species than any other country, and is among the top few for orchids, butterflies and amphibians. Páramo — high moorland with frailejón plants — supplies Bogotá's water.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, rising to about 5,700 m within 42 km of the sea, is the world's highest coastal range. The Pacific Chocó is one of the rainiest places on Earth; the Amazon covers about a third of the country.

Medellín, once the most violent city in the world, invested in cable cars, escalators, libraries and parks for hillside comunas from the 2000s. Comuna 13 is the showcase, though locals point out that gangs still control parts of the city.

Tourism boomed after the peace deal. The side effects include rising rents in El Poblado and Getsemaní, sex tourism that the authorities now target, and crimes aimed at visitors: drugging with scopolamine, robberies after dating-app meetings, and several deaths of foreigners in 2023–2025.

Politics remains polarised. A left-wing government from 2022 pursued talks with armed groups; a senator and presidential candidate was shot in 2025, and a presidential election was held in 2026 (check the outcome). Travellers who fly between the main cities, use app taxis and watch their drinks usually have trouble-free trips.