The high capital
Nine million people on a cold Andean plateau at 2,640 metres, wedged against a wall of green mountains. Bogotá is Colombia’s brain — its museums, its politics, its argument with itself — and it rewards anyone willing to walk it slowly. The gold, the graffiti and the salt cathedral are all within an hour of each other.
Read this first
The useful version, including the parts that do not sell trips. If something here puts you off a plan, that is the page working.
Climate. Cool year-round, 8–19 °C. Rain any month; heaviest April–May and October–November.
At 2,640 m the air holds about a quarter less oxygen than at sea level. Give yourself 24–48 hours before anything strenuous, drink more water than feels necessary, and go easy on alcohol the first night. Altitude sickness is uncommon here but not unheard of.
People pack for the Caribbean and shiver. Bogotá sits at 8–19 °C. Bring a warm layer and a rain shell — the weather changes within an hour and the rain is sideways.
Crossing the city at rush hour can take 90 minutes for 12 km. We build itineraries by neighbourhood cluster rather than making you criss-cross, and we start day trips early for a reason.
Bogotá is far safer than its reputation, and also a big city with opportunistic theft. Keep your phone off the table, use registered cars at night, and ask us which blocks to skip — we live here and we will tell you straight.
20 experiences
Every one runs with a local guide. Filter, or tell us what you like and we will build the days around it.
Culture
A white church on a peak at 3,152 metres with the whole of Bogotá spread out beneath it — nine million people filling a plateau to the horizon. Funicular up, cable car down, and the best possible orientation to the city.
From
$14–$45
per person
Culture
The colonial quarter where Bogotá was founded and where most of its history has since been argued about — ochre and indigo houses, the Plaza de Bolívar, and the streets where the Bogotazo started.
Suggested
$12–$35
pay what you think it was worth
Culture
Fifty-five thousand pieces of pre-Hispanic goldwork, and the best museum in Colombia by a distance. The Muisca raft that gave rise to the El Dorado legend is here, and it is smaller and stranger than you expect.
From
$12–$55
per person
Culture
Bogotá has one of the most permissive street-art environments in the world, for a specific and uncomfortable reason involving a police shooting in 2011. A working artist walks you through the murals and the politics.
Suggested
$12–$30
pay what you think it was worth
Food & Drink
Get there at seven, when the flower hall is being restocked and the fruit sellers will cut open anything you point at. The single best hour in Bogotá and almost nobody does it.
From
$30–$105
per person
Day Trip
A cathedral carved 180 metres underground inside a working salt mine, with fourteen stations of the cross cut into the rock and a cross lit so that it appears to float in the dark. Genuinely unlike anything else.
From
$45–$150
per person
Day Trip
A near-perfect circular lake in the páramo where the Muisca covered a new chief in gold dust and floated him out to make offerings. The Spanish tried to drain it. This is the actual source of the El Dorado myth.
From
$30–$95
per person
Day Trip
One of the largest cobbled plazas in South America, whitewashed colonial buildings, and a dry valley full of fossils — including a fully articulated kronosaurus in the field where it was found.
From
$75–$200
per person
Nature
Five hundred and ninety metres of water down a cliff face in cloud forest, reached by a two-hour hike through dripping green. The tallest waterfall in Colombia and only ninety minutes from the capital.
From
$35–$130
per person
Nature
Páramo is a high Andean moorland that exists almost nowhere else on earth, and it supplies most of Bogotá’s drinking water. Thousands of silver frailejones standing in the mist, glacial lakes, and spectacled bear country.
From
$45–$180
per person
Nightlife
A restaurant the size of a village, built out of scrap metal, fairy lights and about four decades of accumulated madness, where dinner turns into dancing on the tables at some undefined point. There is nothing else like it anywhere.
From
$60–$180
per person
Food & Drink
A colonial village swallowed by the city, whose cobbled streets fill every Sunday with craft stalls, buskers and long lunches. The most relaxed morning available in Bogotá.
Entry fee
Free entry
paid on the door
Adventure
Every Sunday Bogotá closes 120 km of main road to cars and roughly a million people take to bikes. It is the city’s best idea and the easiest way to understand how it fits together.
From
$25–$60
per person
Culture
The same gunpowder-and-lead national sport, played in Bogotá’s craft-beer canchas where the beer is better and the explosions are just as loud.
From
$25–$60
per person
Culture
Colombia produces the finest emeralds on earth, and the trade still happens on a specific pavement in downtown Bogotá between men with folded paper packets. You go with someone who can tell you what you are looking at.
From
$55–$115
per person
Adventure
A five-kilometre sandstone escarpment an hour north of the city, and the birthplace of Colombian climbing. Several hundred bolted routes from complete-beginner slabs upward.
From
$45–$130
per person
Nature
A cloud-forest reserve in the hills above Bogotá with feeders that draw a dozen-plus hummingbird species within arm’s reach, including sword-billed and glowing puffleg. Absurdly good for photography.
From
$25–$110
per person
Wellness
Thermal pools on the far side of the eastern hills, reached over a mountain pass with the best road view of Bogotá anywhere. Warm water at altitude, which is exactly what the city does not otherwise offer.
From
$25–$80
per person
Food & Drink
Ajiaco, tamal santafereño, obleas, chocolate with cheese melted into it, and a great deal of arepa. Bogotá food is built for cold and altitude, and it makes complete sense once you have been outside for an hour.
From
$30–$85
per person
Adventure
Tandem flights off the ridges north of Bogotá, over the Sabana’s patchwork of dairy farms and greenhouses with the reservoir behind. Higher, colder and emptier than flying over a city.
From
$45–$110
per person
Private & VIP
3 days · max 6 people
The capital done properly and slowly, planned around the altitude rather than against it. Gold, salt, graffiti and the best market breakfast in the country — with a driver who knows which streets to avoid at 5pm.
