🇨🇴 Colombia · Andean Region
Bogotá is one of those capitals that throws you at first and wins you over slowly. It's perched at 2,640 meters above sea level, on an enormous plateau at the foot of the eastern hills, so the first thing you notice is the cool mountain air and a shifting light: the same day starts cold and cloudy, turns sunny by afternoon and ends with a drizzle. It's vast, chaotic and diverse, and at the same time it holds a historic quarter, La Candelaria, that seems frozen in another era, with its brightly painted colonial mansions, wooden balconies and cobbled streets.
Here the colonial and republican Bogotá of the center coexists with the modern, buzzing Bogotá of the north, full of chef-led restaurants, specialty coffee shops, nightlife and neighborhoods with real character like Usaquén, Chapinero or the Zona T. In between there are first-rate museums (the Gold Museum and the Botero Museum are unmissable and almost never disappoint), street art everywhere and a cultural scene that never stops. It's the gateway to Colombia and the best place to start understanding the country.
Take it easy on the first day because of the altitude, dress in layers (the weather is treacherous) and let yourself be surprised. Ride up Monserrate at sunset to see the city stretch to the horizon, get lost in La Candelaria with a tinto (coffee) in hand, try ajiaco santafereño and head north to see the city's other face. Bogotá rewards the curious, patient traveler.
Long before the Spanish, the Bogotá plateau was the heart of Muisca territory, a highly organized farming and goldworking society governed by the zipa of Bacatá. In 1538 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada founded Santa Fe on that territory, which in time would become the capital of the New Kingdom of Granada and later of independent Colombia. The full history, with the myth of El Dorado and the Muisca, is on the history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Bogotá existed, the plateau on which the city now stands was the heart of the Muisca people, one of the great pre-Hispanic civilizations of Colombia. The Muisca (also called Chibcha) were a highly organized farming society settled on the Cundiboyacense high plateau, with advanced knowledge of agriculture, astronomy, trade and goldwork. They grew maize and potatoes in the highlands, worked the salt deposits (hence the importance of places like Zipaquirá) and traded in emeralds and cotton.
Politically they were organized into confederations governed by chiefs. The two most powerful lordships were that of the zipa, centered on Bacatá (from which the name Bogotá comes), and that of the zaque, centered on Hunza (today's Tunja). The name 'Bacatá' is of Muisca origin and is usually interpreted as 'enclosure outside the farmland' or as a place name tied to the local geography. When the Spanish arrived, this territory was densely populated and deeply rooted in its own culture, language and religion.
Among the Muisca there was a ceremony which, transformed and exaggerated by the conquistadors, would give rise to one of the most famous legends in history: El Dorado. On the sacred Lake Guatavita, near Bogotá, the new chief (according to the chronicles) would cover his body in gold dust and travel out on a raft to the center of the water, where he and the priests cast offerings of gold and emeralds as tribute to the gods. That figure of the 'gilded man' is the one depicted in the celebrated Muisca Raft at the Gold Museum.
The Spanish, hearing these accounts, took them literally and out of all proportion: they imagined a city or a kingdom made entirely of gold. The obsessive search for El Dorado sent expeditions across South America for decades and cost thousands of lives, without anyone ever finding a city that never existed. The legend, however, marked the image of the territory forever and remains a central part of Bogotá's story.
In 1536 an expedition under Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada set out from the Caribbean coast toward the interior in search of El Dorado and of a route to Peru. After a brutal march through jungles and rivers, in which most of his men died, Quesada reached the high plateau and came upon the densely populated Muisca territory. He subdued the Muisca in a relatively swift conquest, exploiting internal rivalries and the superiority of Spanish weapons, and seized an enormous haul of gold and emeralds.
Tradition places the founding of the city on 6 August 1538, when Quesada established a camp they called Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza, on the site we know today as the Chorro de Quevedo, in La Candelaria. The city was named Santa Fe, to which the name of the territory was later added, giving 'Santa Fe de Bogotá'. The formal legal founding, with all the Spanish bureaucratic requirements, was completed in 1539. A few years later, the crown raised it to the rank of city and made it the capital of the New Kingdom of Granada.
During the colonial period, Santa Fe de Bogotá grew as the administrative, religious and cultural center of the New Kingdom of Granada. The city was organized around the main square (today Plaza de Bolívar) following the typical Spanish grid layout, with the cathedral, the town council and the houses of the powerful ranged around it. The religious orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, Augustinians) raised churches, convents and colleges that still define the landscape of La Candelaria today.
In 1717, and definitively in 1739, Santa Fe became the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, one of the great viceroyalties of the Spanish empire in the Americas, which increased its political importance. In the 18th century the city was also the seat of the Royal Botanical Expedition led by the scholar José Celestino Mutis, an ambitious scientific project that catalogued the territory's flora and trained a generation of enlightened criollos, several of whom would later lead the independence movement.
Bogotá was one of the epicenters of the independence process. On 20 July 1810, an incident over a flower vase in the main square (the famous 'Florero de Llorente') sparked the Cry of Independence, which set the break with Spain in motion. After years of war and the Spanish reconquest, Simón Bolívar's victory at the Battle of Boyacá in 1819 sealed independence and opened the way to the liberation of the territory.
With independence, Bogotá became the capital of Gran Colombia, Bolívar's ambitious project uniting present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama. Once Gran Colombia dissolved, the city remained the capital of the new republic (which in time would be called Colombia) and the center of the country's political, intellectual and cultural power. For its intense academic and literary life, it came to be nicknamed 'the Athens of South America'.
The 20th century transformed Bogotá from a provincial, genteel city into a metropolis of millions. A turning point came on 9 April 1948: the assassination of the political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán unleashed 'El Bogotazo', a day of popular fury that destroyed much of the center and marked the beginning of the period of political violence known as 'La Violencia'. The city rebuilt itself and, from mid-century onward, grew at breakneck speed through migration from the countryside, absorbing former municipalities such as Usaquén and Suba.
Over recent decades, Bogotá has steadily gained infrastructure and cultural life: the TransMilenio mass transit system was born, the cycle path network and the Sunday Ciclovía developed (a model imitated around the world), and its museums, its food scene and its street art flourished. Today it's an enormous, diverse and contradictory capital of close to eight million people, combining its Muisca and colonial past with one of the most dynamic cultural and culinary scenes in Latin America.