Discovery and Hospitality in the Colombian Andes
This Christmas Day finds me at 4.7 degrees north of the Equator, 74.1 degrees west of Greenwich, and about 8,600 feet above sea level. Bogotá sits here on its tilted plateau, a capital of roughly 7.4 million people, a city that feels both equatorial and alpine at the same time. Mountain cable cars and palm trees grace its many slopes in improbable harmony.
From such a vantage point, Colombia’s contrasts come into view. Low, brightly painted colonial buildings in el centro radiate outward toward glass and steel towers, then to barrios of small shops behind roll‑down gates and homes ringed with barbed wire. Along cracked sidewalks—sometimes more archaeological dig than pavement—trees abound. Entire streets are shaded. Pockets of eucalyptus and pine remind you that this is not a tropical postcard coast, but a broad Andean valley high enough to touch the clouds.
Over the past two months I have been working my way toward this plateau. I started by battling humidity in Cartagena and Santa Marta; I sought shade in the green forest around Minca. I found history in banana country around Aracataca. I gazed skyward to the giant fronds of telephone‑pole‑straight wax palms of Salento and Carbonera. I learned the science and fragility of coffee at a finca near Pereira. Most recently I toured the neighborhoods and hilltops of Medellín, alive with street art and the memory of troubled times. All of this has today shifted from eager anticipation into a book of grateful memories.
Two centuries ago, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) climbed toward this same plateau with barometers and notebooks, measuring what my phone now reports in a handful of numbers. He arrived in Bogotá in 1801, in the middle of a five‑year expedition through Latin America (1799–1804), after weeks on the Magdalena River, driven by the same curiosity that has carried me here by bus, cable car, and search engine.
Without quite meaning to, I have traced a faint echo of Humboldt’s path: Cartagena and the Caribbean, the Magdalena valley, and finally this Andean basin. He came to catalog climates and species; I came to learn about García Márquez, Botero, and Escobar, and to collect photos and stickers. Where he battled mud, heat, and mosquitoes along the Magdalena before climbing into cool air, I bounced along highways and river valleys, feeling the same abrupt shift from tropical river to highland spring.
During that time, a phrase kept returning to me: Hay muchos colombianos. There are many Colombians. This is a big country. Its streets teem with life—vendors, buses, motorbikes, and an endless current of pedestrians. Each seems to know exactly how to slip past the other in the bright, chaotic choreography of the sidewalk. On the Medellín Metro there is no slipping past one another. I have been pressed up against a hundred Colombians at a time—and more of their body parts than I care to recount. On one trip, a grandmother with a child—so deep in the crowd that I could not tell if it was a boy or a girl—accepted my silent offer to take my arm and hold on for dear life. When we exited, she made sure that I knew which train to take next. (I decided to walk.)
In cities large and small, street corners are stations for food stalls and kiosks: arepas on griddles, fruit cut and salted, coffee in tiny paper cups, trays of candies whose names I have already forgotten, cables and phone chargers hanging like garlands. Somewhere in that mix there is torta de zanahoria—carrot cake. I ate at least a dozen slices, none of which were the same: citrusy one place, dense with raisins or sometimes peanuts the next, with frosting and without. The country deserves a Rand McNally fruit atlas: lulo, guanábana, maracuyá, granadilla, and a dozen more with flavors somewhere between citrus, melon, and maybe something that has not yet been named.
Colombia’s nonhuman traffic is just as busy as the human kind. Colombia holds the world record for bird diversity—close to a fifth of all bird species on the planet fly, nest, or pass through here. The Andes split into three ranges, and between them lie valleys and cloud forests where species have had time to specialize—Colombia’s answer to Ecuador’s Galápagos. At the same time, entire North American populations move overhead. Raptors and songbirds wing across the Caribbean and along the mountains, funneled by geography and instinct into migration corridors that cross Colombia twice a year. Humboldt would have recognized this as one of his living “maps”: birds changing with every hundred meters of height, climate and species stacked in invisible bands above the same patch of earth.
Colombia is a natural wonderland, home to over 300 distinct ecosystems. One of them, the high Andean páramo, I had never heard of because it exists in very few places and a very large share of it is here. It is a tropical mountain grassland–shrubland perched between treeline and permanent snow. It is shrouded in cloud, mist, and rain, yet it somehow mimics a desert. The sombrero and the wool poncho are both at home here, as is the Andean condor. Colombia holds roughly half of the world’s páramo; I am glad it does.
Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist and explorer, hailed in his lifetime as a Second Columbus, helped invent modern physical geography and ecology. He once turned an Andean volcano into a vertical map of life: he saw bands of forest, scrub, and alpine plants stacked from valley floor to snowbank. Standing in Colombia’s páramo, in the cloud and wind he tried to describe, I understand why he thought one mountain could explain a whole planet.
Humboldt did not include it, but I will. The soundscape of Colombia, especially its Caribbean region, is its own distinct ecosystem. Music pours from houses, buses, corner shops, and hand‑held speakers, and always all at once. The default setting of every sound system is eleven. The sounds of reggaetón, vallenato, salsa, and more hit you like an accidental remix as soon as you leave your hotel and sometimes before.
Human diversity here is also a kind of remix. The country’s 50‑plus million inhabitants come from historic Indigenous nations, Spanish colonization, and the forced arrival of Africans through Caribbean ports such as Cartagena. The mix plays out differently in each region: Afro‑Colombian communities along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, Indigenous groups concentrated in the Amazon and highlands, mestizo majorities in the big cities. In Cartagena’s November independence celebrations, drums and brass and crowded streets tell the story; it is repeated in the Andean city of Pasto in January, in festivals like the Carnaval de Negros y Blancos.
Christmas in Colombia does not arrive and leave in a day. It unfolds across the Novena de Aguinaldos, a nine‑night sequence of prayers, songs, and family gatherings starting on December 16. Catholicism still quietly organizes Colombians’ calendars. Every church I’ve stepped into—whether in a busy Bogotá neighborhood or a smaller town—has held more of the devout than the merely curious, like me. Candles, statues, and crèches lie under the watchful eye of saints whose names I mostly recognize and whose biographies I mostly do not. Even from my skeptical pew in the back, I was often moved by the devout, kneeling in prayer and in hope for a cure, a child, a job.
From my perch in the Andes, clouds sliding past the hills and city lights flickering on before dusk, I thought about the role of place in a traveler’s life. Humboldt measured his world with barometers and compasses; I measure it with Google Maps pins and travel apps. We both turn the numbers that tell us altitude, latitude, and elevation—meant to locate us on the surface of this world—into the building blocks of an explorer’s internal home, a True North. Humboldt demonstrated that every landscape is both calculation and feeling: isotherms and barometric readings, as well as the kindness of strangers or the hand of an abuela on your arm in the Medellín Metro.
From high in the Andes: Feliz Navidad from Colombia.
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