Is Cali Safe? The Answer From the People Who Drive It Every Day

Ask whether Cali is safe and you will get one of two answers: a number about a city of millions, or somebody’s holiday anecdote. Neither tells you what you actually want to know, which is whether the specific movements you are about to make would be made by the people answering. We drive this city and the three roads out of it every week. Here is what the authorities publish, what we do differently, and the one thing nobody can honestly tell you yet.

Written by the Safe Transfers Colombia operations team. Every figure below was checked against its primary source on 11 September 2026; the sources are listed at the foot of the page.

The honest answer starts with a gap

Almost every page you will read about safety in Cali quotes a crime figure. Very few mention when the figure stops.

Colombia’s national police publish their crime data openly, month by month, municipality by municipality, on the government’s open data portal. We pulled the Cali series ourselves on 11 September 2026 rather than taking anyone’s summary of it. The most recent month in both the homicide dataset and the theft dataset is July 2026.

The earthquake struck on 10 August 2026.

So every crime statistic available for Cali today, including every one on this page, describes the city as it was before the single largest disruption it has experienced in decades. That gap is not a reason to panic and it is not a reason to dismiss the numbers. It is a reason to be precise about what they can and cannot support. They can tell you what kind of city Cali has been and who its violence has fallen on. They cannot tell you what this month looks like, and anybody who implies otherwise has not checked where their data ends.

What the police figures actually say

These are the totals for the municipality of Santiago de Cali, taken directly from the national police datasets on datos.gov.co and summed by us, not quoted from a secondary report.

Read the bottom two rows together, because they are the whole story of the last year and they point in opposite directions. Homicide in the first seven months of 2026 was up about sixteen per cent on the same months of 2025. Theft from the person over exactly the same period was down about twenty-three per cent.

That is an unusual combination, and it is worth sitting with. A city getting more dangerous in the way that produces bodies can, at the same time, be getting notably safer in the way that produces a stolen phone on a Tuesday afternoon. The two curves are not measuring the same thing, and they are not measuring the same people.

One more figure from the same dataset, because it does more work than any other single number here. Of the 663 homicides recorded in Cali between January and July 2026, 543 were committed with a firearm, 92 with a knife or other sharp weapon, and 28 with blunt force. Roughly four in five were shootings.

Who those homicide figures are about

A city-wide homicide count is a blunt instrument, and used carelessly it frightens people out of trips they would have enjoyed and tells them nothing useful about their own week. So here is the part that matters, stated as carefully as we can.

The police dataset records the weapon, the sex, the date and the municipality. It does not record the neighbourhood. That means we cannot give you a comuna-by-comuna ranking from it, and we are not going to build one out of impressions and call it data. What the dataset does support is the shape: a homicide problem that is overwhelmingly armed, overwhelmingly concentrated among young men, and driven by disputes between groups that have no interest in and no contact with a visitor.

What that means for you in practice is that the headline number is not a probability that applies to your trip. The risk that does apply to your trip is the theft line, the one that has been falling for four years running, and it is the ordinary urban risk of any large city: a phone taken at a table on a terrace, a bag off the back of a chair, a moment of inattention at a cash machine.

This is the same conclusion we reach in our Medellín safety guide, and for the same reason: the violence that makes the statistics is structurally separate from the visitor, while the crime that will actually happen to you is mundane, preventable, and rarely discussed. Cali differs from Medellín in one respect worth naming. Medellín’s characteristic risk to foreigners is being drugged and robbed after a voluntary social encounter. In Cali the pattern we see reported is more ordinary opportunism, and more of it in transit: at a stopped car, at a kerb, around a phone held up to navigate.

The earthquake, a month on

At 7:34 in the morning on Monday 10 August 2026, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck at a depth of about 108 kilometres, with its epicentre two kilometres south-east of San José del Palmar in Chocó. Forty-four minutes later a magnitude 5.0 aftershock followed in the same place. Those figures are from the United States Geological Survey catalogue, read from the raw record rather than a news report.

Cali was among the worst-affected cities. The Alcaldía de Santiago de Cali maintains an official information repository for the earthquake, and its figures as last updated at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday 8 September 2026 are:

• 154 people dead
• 1,657 injured
• 88 people rescued
• 14 reported missing
• 24 buildings totally collapsed

On the first day the city declared a state of public calamity, imposed an overnight curfew, and reinforced the army in comunas 17 and 19 as the worst-hit sectors. The health system took the heaviest institutional blow: the district health secretariat declared a red hospital alert with the network at full capacity, seven health facilities were evacuated, and four significant hospitals were left with serious structural damage, among them the Hospital Universitario del Valle.

A month later the picture is one of a city working, with specific scars. The curfew is long gone. The mass transit system, the MIO, announced full reactivation of service along Calle Quinta on 23 August and reopened the Calipso terminal with its eleven usual routes the following Monday. The ordinary traffic restriction came back on 1 September. Aftershocks have continued, as they do after an event of this size; the Servicio Geológico Colombiano publishes every one of them as it is recorded.

Moving around the city right now

This is the part of the answer that a transport company is actually qualified to give, and it is the part most safety pages skip.

The traffic restriction is back. Cali restored its ordinary pico y placa city-wide from Tuesday 1 September 2026, after the exceptional arrangements that followed the earthquake. As published by the city, it runs Monday to Friday from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., with two plate digits restricted per day:

Two things to know about that table. The rotation changes roughly every six months, so check the city’s own page rather than trusting any table you find online, including this one, if you are reading months after the date at the top. And the city’s bulletins describe the measure as applying to vehicles on private-service plates, by last digit. If you are renting a car, that is your problem to plan around. If you are being driven, it is a fair and specific question to put to the operator.

There are sectors the city asks drivers to avoid. When the Secretaría de Movilidad Distrital announced the return to normal restrictions, it named five points where emergency and recovery work was still under way and asked drivers to keep clear:

• Imbanaco
• Calle 5 with Carrera 44
• The Plaza de Toros sector
• Mall Plaza
• Carrera 44 with Calle 9

That list is a traffic instruction rather than a crime warning, and it will change. We mention it because it is the kind of current, specific, locally published detail that decides whether a transfer arrives on time, and because it tells you something true about the city: the disruption is in identifiable places, not everywhere.

The airport road

Alfonso Bonilla Aragón, the airport that serves Cali, is not in Cali. It sits out towards Palmira, and the journey is a proper road journey rather than a hop across town. That single fact generates more of the avoidable trouble we see than anything else in this city.

The pattern is always the same. A flight lands late. The arrangement that looked fine on a laptop three weeks earlier turns out to be a phone number that does not answer. Somebody is tired, it is dark, and the decision about who to get into a car with gets made in ninety seconds at the kerb by a person who has never been here before. Nothing about that decision has anything to do with the homicide rate, and everything to do with how the trip was set up.

Our practical position, which costs us nothing to say and which you can act on without using us: the airport run is the one leg of a Cali trip worth arranging in advance and confirming the day before. Whoever you use, have a name, a plate, a phone number that a human answers, and a price agreed before the car moves. Our own Cali airport transfer page sets out how we do it, and the detail there is the standard to hold anyone to, not just us.

Taxi, app, or a car with a company behind it

Three ways to move in Cali, three different risk profiles, and the difference is not the one people expect.

A street taxi flagged down at random is the least predictable option, because you are accepting a vehicle, a driver, and a price simultaneously from a stranger, with no record that the journey ever happened. A ride-hailing app is more predictable, because there is a record and a route, though the regulatory position of those apps in Colombia has been contested for years and the driver is not employed by anyone you could hold responsible. A private transfer with a company behind it is the most predictable, because the vehicle, the driver, the price and the liability are all fixed before you get in.

That last sentence is only true if the company is actually a company. This is the check almost nobody makes, and it is the one that matters most.

Colombian passenger transport is a regulated activity. A legitimate operator holds a habilitación as an enterprise, each vehicle carries a tarjeta de operación, and passengers are covered by insurance that exists because the operator is registered. An informal arrangement, however friendly and however cheap, has none of that, and the moment something goes wrong there is no one to be liable. We wrote a full guide to ground transport compliance in Colombia because corporate clients kept asking us what to verify. The short version fits in a sentence: ask for the habilitación, the tarjeta de operación, and the passenger insurance, and ask before you pay.

The three roads out of Cali, and what two governments say about them

Cali is a base as much as a destination, and the day trips are most of why people come. We run three routes out of the city. Two of them touch areas that foreign governments warn about, and we would rather you read that here than discover it when you check your insurance.

West, to Buenaventura and the Pacific

The British Foreign Office advises against all but essential travel to, in its own words, “the western part of Valle del Cauca Department, including Buenaventura”. Buenaventura is the destination, so the warning covers the end of this road rather than a patch of it. The United States advisory does not name Valle del Cauca at all.

We run the route, in daylight, with drivers who have driven it for years. We are not going to tell you the advisory does not exist or that it does not apply to you. If your travel insurance is British, or written against Foreign Office advice, check whether it covers you in an area under an all-but-essential warning before you book anything, because a good many policies do not. Our Cali to Buenaventura transfer page has the route detail.

South, to Popayán

Here the two governments disagree, and the disagreement is worth understanding rather than averaging.

The British Foreign Office advises against all but essential travel to “the municipality of Jamundí, Valle del Cauca”, which is immediately south of Cali and which the road passes through, and separately to “the western part of Cauca Department”. The road south to Popayán does not run through western Cauca. The United States advisory is wider: it places “Arauca, Cauca (excluding Popayán), and Norte de Santander departments” in its Do Not Travel category. On the American reading, the Cauca stretch of this road is inside a Do Not Travel department; on the British reading, it is not, though the Jamundí stretch at the Cali end is under an all-but-essential warning.

Both exclude Popayán itself. We run the route in daylight and we plan it as a day, not an evening. Our Cali to Popayán transfer page covers the practical side. The decision about the advisories is yours, and it should be made with them in front of you.

North, to the coffee region

This is the one road out of Cali with no government travel warning at either end or along its length. Neither the British nor the American advisory names the corridor north through Valle del Cauca towards Armenia and Pereira. The ordinary cautions apply and no more: daylight, a driver who knows the descent into the Quindío, and a vehicle with current papers. Our Cali to coffee region transfer page has the timings.

What we tell our own passengers

Six things, in the order they tend to matter.

1. Arrange the airport leg before you fly. Not because the road is dangerous, but because the kerb at midnight is where bad decisions get made under time pressure.
2. Do not navigate on a phone held up in the street. A visible phone in a stationary car with the window down is the single most common way a visitor here loses one. Screenshot the route or ask the driver.
3. Take the drink from the bar, and watch it poured. Cali is a going-out city and that is most of its charm. The precaution costs nothing.
4. Treat cash machines as an indoor activity. Inside a bank, inside a shopping centre, during the day.
5. Agree the price before the car moves. With us, with a taxi, with anyone. The conversation that happens before the journey never turns into an argument at the end of it.
6. Plan the day trips as days. The roads out of Cali are mountain roads. Leaving early and being back before dark is not timidity, it is how the people who drive them for a living do it.

None of that is specific to Cali except the sixth. We include it because the questions we are actually asked are practical, and because a page that only quotes statistics has not helped anyone decide anything.

If something happens

The emergency number in Colombia is 123, and it works from any phone. Cali’s own published lines during the earthquake emergency included 119 for the fire service and 132 for the Red Cross.

For a theft, report it. Not because you will get the phone back, but because an unreported crime is invisible to the figures that the next traveller will read, and because most insurance requires the report. For anything involving a foreign national, your embassy is the right first call after the immediate emergency is handled.

If you are travelling with us and something goes wrong, the number you were given is answered by a person, and that is the point of the arrangement.

So, is Cali safe?

Here is the answer we would give a friend.

Cali is a city with a serious, long-standing homicide problem that is almost entirely concentrated among people with no connection to visitors, and with a street-theft problem that is real, ordinary, and has been falling hard for four years. It has just absorbed a major earthquake and is visibly still working through it, with the practical consequences for a visitor being logistical rather than dangerous. The routes out of it into the Pacific and the south carry government travel warnings that we think you should read before booking rather than after.

Is that safe? For most visitors doing most things, with the airport leg arranged in advance and a phone kept in a pocket, yes, in the same qualified way that a large city anywhere is safe. What we will not do is put a number on your personal risk, or tell you that the statistics prove something about this month when the statistics stop in July.

If you want the comparison, we have written the same kind of page for two other Colombian cities. They reach different conclusions, because the cities are different.

• Our guide to whether Bogotá is safe
• Our guide to whether Cartagena is safe

Questions travellers ask

Is Cali more dangerous than Bogotá or Medellín?

By homicide rate, Cali has been the highest of Colombia’s three largest cities for many years, and the 2025 figure of 1,068 in a city far smaller than Bogotá makes that plain. By the crime that is likely to touch a visitor, the gap narrows considerably, and Cali’s theft figures have been falling faster than most. The comparison people reach for is usually the wrong one for the decision they are making.

Which areas of Cali should I avoid?

We are not going to publish a neighbourhood blacklist built on impressions, because the police data we use does not record neighbourhoods and we will not dress up opinion as evidence. What we will say is concrete: the city itself currently asks drivers to avoid five specific points because of earthquake recovery work, listed above, and the areas that carry Cali’s homicide burden are residential districts a visitor has no reason to be in and no route through.

Is it safe to go out at night in Cali?

Going out is the reason many people come to Cali, and the salsa places are not the problem. The ordinary rules apply, and one of them is transport: arrange how you are getting home before you go out, rather than at two in the morning on a pavement.

Are the hospitals working after the earthquake?

Partially, and not as they were. Four major facilities were left with serious structural damage in the first days, among them the Hospital Universitario del Valle, and the city declared a red hospital alert with its network at capacity. A month on the system is functioning, but if you have a condition that might need hospital care, that is worth a conversation before you travel rather than after you arrive.

Do I need to worry about aftershocks?

Aftershocks follow an earthquake of this size for weeks and months. The Servicio Geológico Colombiano records and publishes each one. Practically, this means knowing where the stairs are in your hotel, which is a sensible thing to know anywhere.

Can I just use Uber in Cali?

Ride-hailing apps operate in Cali and many visitors use them without incident. What they do not give you is a company that is liable to you, and their regulatory position in Colombia has been disputed for years. For a short hop across the city that may not matter to you. For an airport run at night, or a road out of the department, it should.

Is Cali worth visiting at all right now?

People are visiting, the airport is working, and the city has every reason to want them there. We would go, and we do go, weekly. We would arrange the airport leg in advance, read the two advisories before committing to a Pacific day trip, and not take a crime statistic from July as a statement about September.