Travel Guides

Most Medellín accommodation advice compares neighbourhoods on atmosphere. That is the easy half. The half that decides whether your week runs smoothly is whether the place you booked is legally allowed to rent to you, and how the address you picked behaves at seven in the morning when a car has to reach it. This…

Filandia is seven kilometres up a spur road. It is not on the way to anywhere, which is the whole reason it still looks the way it does, and it is also the reason people who try to add it to a Salento day end up doing neither properly. Here is what the town is,…

Salento is a small municipality in Quindío that happens to sit at the gate of a national park, and the Valle de Cocora is a working rural valley ten kilometres north of it that a Colombian court has declared a subject of rights. Almost everything written about this place is a photo caption. This is…

The Laguna de Guatavita is not in Guatavita. It sits in the neighbouring municipality of Sesquilé, at 2.595 metres, inside a forest reserve where you cannot walk alone, cannot bring food, cannot fly a drone and cannot pay by card. The town called Guatavita is a different place 53 kilómetros from Bogotá on the shore…

In December 1954 the Colombian government declared Villa de Leyva a national monument, and it did not mean a building. The decree covers “todo su perímetro urbano” — the entire town. That single sentence is why the streets are still stone, why the plaza is still 14.000 square metres of it, and why the town…

The cathedral you walk into at Zipaquirá is the second one. The first opened in 1954 and was closed in September 1992 because the rock above it was no longer safe. The one that replaced it sits 180 metres underground in a mine that is still being worked, and it is the reason around 600.000…

Bogotá is 2.600 metres up, 14 °C most of the year, and the busiest airport in Latin America sits inside it. Almost every guide to the city lists the same museums in the same order and tells you nothing about the two rules that will shape your week: which days your car is banned from…

Palomino is not in Magdalena, it is not a suburb of Santa Marta, and it is not on the way to anywhere else. It is a corregimiento of Dibulla, in La Guajira, sitting on the last stretch of coast before the road runs out of towns. The river you float down is the departmental border.…

Santa Marta is the oldest surviving city in South America and almost nobody comes for the city. They come for what is around it, which is a national park that shuts three times a year, a mountain village up a road that was paved within living memory, a lost city closed for the whole of…

Minca is thirteen and a half kilometres from Santa Marta, and until the road was paved that took an hour and a half. It now takes twenty minutes from the eastern edge of the city. That single change is why the town filled up with hostels, and it is also why most people arrive with…

Tayrona is the reason most people come to Santa Marta, and in 2026 it has been shut, or half shut, more often than any guide will tell you. The park closes three times a year by agreement with the four indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada. This year it also closed twice more without warning,…

Guatapé is the day trip almost everyone takes out of Medellín, and the town is not the hard part. The road is. There are two ways in with different toll counts, the approach to the rock has queued for two kilometres and up to six hours on a bad weekend, and the department has more…