Colombia

Before the Spanish, the highlands were home to the Muisca, whose gold offerings to a sacred lake gave rise to the legend of El Dorado. Spanish conquest from the 1530s founded Bogotá, Cartagena, and Popayán, and Cartagena became the fortified main port for shipping South American silver and gold to Spain — and a major slave market.

Independence was won between 1810 and 1819 under Simón Bolívar, whose victory at Boyacá secured it. The union he led, Gran Colombia, soon broke apart, leaving a country that spent the nineteenth century in civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives. That rivalry culminated in "La Violencia," a decade of partisan bloodshed after 1948 that killed some 200,000 people.

From the 1960s, leftist guerrillas — the FARC and the ELN — right-wing paramilitaries, and, from the 1980s, the Medellín and Cali drug cartels turned Colombia into one of the most violent countries in the world. The cartels were broken in the 1990s; a 2016 peace accord demobilised the FARC after a 52-year war, though smaller armed groups and the ELN fight on. Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla, became the country's first leftist president in 2022.

Colombia is really several regional cultures. The Caribbean coast — costeño — is relaxed, African-influenced, and musical; the Andean interior, centred on Bogotá, is more formal; Medellín and Antioquia (paisa) are entrepreneurial and proud; Cali is the salsa capital; and the Pacific coast is predominantly Afro-Colombian.

Music runs deep: cumbia and vallenato from the coast, salsa in Cali, and a strong contemporary pop and reggaeton scene. The country's literary giant is Gabriel García Márquez, whose Macondo is drawn from the banana-zone towns of the Caribbean lowlands. Coffee, grown on small farms in the central Andes, is a source of national identity as much as an export.

Colombians have a reputation for warmth, formality in address, and resilience — and a weariness with foreigners who know the country only through its narco past. Catholicism remains strong, and festivals, from Barranquilla's Carnival to countless local ferias, fill the calendar.

About three-quarters of Colombians live in cities, chiefly Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and Barranquilla. Medellín, once synonymous with cartel violence, has become a showcase of urban transformation, with metro cable cars connecting hillside comunas to the centre.

The economy runs on oil, coal, coffee, flowers, and increasingly tourism and services, with a large informal sector. Decades of conflict left millions internally displaced, and the country has since absorbed nearly three million Venezuelans fleeing their own crisis.

Everyday life features the menú del día lunch, strong sweet tinto coffee sold from thermoses on the street, football, and Sunday ciclovía, when major city roads close to cars for cyclists, joggers, and skaters.

Colombian cooking is regional and generally mild, built on maize, rice, beans, plantain, potato, and meat. The bandeja paisa of Antioquia piles beans, rice, minced beef, chicharrón, sausage, a fried egg, plantain, avocado, and an arepa onto one plate. Ajiaco, a Bogotá chicken-and-potato soup with the herb guascas and a spoon of capers and cream, is the highland comfort dish.

Arepas — flat maize cakes — take a different form in every region, and the coast adds coconut rice, fried fish, and sancocho stew. Street food means empanadas, buñuelos, arepas de huevo, and skewered meat, with fresh tropical-fruit juices in water or milk everywhere.

Colombian specialty coffee is now widely available at home after years of the best beans being exported, and aguardiente, an anise spirit, is the traditional party drink, alongside rum from the coast and chicha, a fermented maize drink.

Cartagena is the headline: a walled colonial city on the Caribbean, with balconied streets, the fortress of San Felipe, and boats to the white sand and clear water of the Rosario Islands. Along the coast, Tayrona National Park backs jungle-fringed beaches with the mountains behind, and a multi-day trek leads to the "Lost City," Ciudad Perdida, of the Tayrona people.

The coffee region around Salento, Manizales, and Armenia offers farm stays, green hills, and the Cocora Valley, where wax palms 60 metres tall rise from the pasture. Medellín and its transformed comunas, the whitewashed hill town of Guatapé beneath its giant climbable rock, and the desert of La Guajira in the far north add variety.

Bogotá has the Gold Museum, one of the great collections of pre-Columbian goldwork, and the Salt Cathedral carved into a working mine nearby. Farther out lie the pink-and-red "liquid rainbow" of Caño Cristales in the eastern plains, the Amazon around Leticia, whale-watching on the Pacific coast at Nuquí and Bahía Solano, and the archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia.