🇨🇴 Colombia · Andean
The Laguna de La Cocha, also known as Lake Guamués, is one of the loveliest and most serene corners of southern Colombia: the country's second largest natural lake, an enormous sheet of water at 2,800 meters altitude in the department of Nariño, ringed by green mountains and often wrapped in a mist that gives it an almost Alpine air. A short distance from Pasto, it's one of the unmissable outings of the southern Andean region.
Its charm has several ingredients: the lakeside district of El Encano, with its picturesque red-roofed houses and the jetties from which the boats set off; the island of La Corota, a small flora and fauna sanctuary covered in native Andean forest reached by boat; and the trout, farmed locally and served a thousand ways at the restaurants along the water. All of it in a cold, quiet setting of a melancholy beauty that wins you over.
This guide covers the Laguna de La Cocha with a practical eye: how to get here from Pasto, how to do the boat trip to La Corota, what to see in El Encano, where to eat the trout and how to enjoy this Andean landscape. La Cocha is water, mist, red roofs and silence: the serene soul of southern Nariño.
The Laguna de La Cocha is a natural lake on the Nariño high plateau, home to great Andean biodiversity and a source of life for the area's farming communities, who have developed a remarkable conservation model: many families around it maintain 'civil society nature reserves' that protect the Andean forest. At the center of the lake, the island of La Corota was declared a Flora and Fauna Sanctuary (one of the smallest in Colombia) to protect its native forest. The name 'Cocha' comes from Quechua and means 'lake'. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Andean department of the far south, on the border with Ecuador: land of the Pasto and Quillacinga peoples, of the city of Pasto and its Carnival of Blacks and Whites, of the Las Lajas sanctuary, of Lake La Cocha and of the Pacific coast at Tumaco.
Read the history of Nariño →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Red-roofed houses reflected in still water, canals along which a wooden boat glides and a mist that erases the mountains: the first time you see the Laguna de La Cocha it's hard to believe you're in the tropics, a step from the equator. And yet this great Andean lake with its Alpine air is not only in Colombia but in its coldest southwestern corner, the Nariño high plateau, at 2,800 meters altitude. La Cocha —whose technical name is Lake Guamués— is the country's second largest natural lake, after Tota in Boyacá, several kilometers across and ringed by mountains, Andean forests and farming hamlets. The name 'Cocha' comes from Quechua and means, precisely, 'lake', a testimony to the Andean influence that arrived from the south.
The climate around it is cold and damp, with frequent mists covering the water and the mountains, giving La Cocha a melancholy, almost Alpine air that makes it unmistakable. The lake is an important water source and a high-altitude wetland of great ecological value, home to numerous species of birds, fish and páramo and Andean forest flora.
The lake drains toward the Amazon basin through the Guamués river, which connects it hydrologically to the great network of waters flowing east. That position, in the transition between the Andes and the Amazon slope, contributes to its biological richness and its singular scenery, and makes it a meeting point of natural environments.
At the heart of the lake rises the island of La Corota, an islet covered in dense native Andean forest that is one of the country's most singular protected spaces. It was declared a Flora and Fauna Sanctuary, and is usually noted as one of the smallest sanctuaries in Colombia's protected-areas system, managed by Parques Nacionales Naturales.
The reason for its protection is the extraordinary richness of its forest: in a small space, La Corota preserves a very well-conserved sample of the native vegetation of the Andean plateau, with trees, mosses, ferns, orchids, bromeliads and lush flora typical of the cold, damp climate, along with wildlife and birds. It's a refuge of biodiversity and a natural laboratory of the region's Andean ecosystems.
The island is visited via an ecological trail through the forest, letting visitors venture into this unique environment under strict conservation rules. La Corota also holds cultural and spiritual value for the area's communities. Its small size and its great ecological value make it a symbol of how to conserve nature in delicate places, and the main draw for anyone sailing the Laguna de La Cocha.
One of the most remarkable things about La Cocha is the conservation model developed by the farming communities around it. Many families in the hamlets ringing the lake have created 'civil society nature reserves', private areas dedicated to protecting and restoring the Andean forest on their own land. This movement, driven by local organizations, has turned La Cocha into a recognized example of conservation led by the community, combining the protection of nature with rural life and ecotourism.
On the lake shore, the district of El Encano —particularly the Puerto El Encano sector— has established itself as the center of tourist activity. Its wooden houses with colorful red roofs, its jetties, its canals and its trout restaurants give it a picturesque, endearing air reminiscent of European scenery, especially when the mist covers the water. Trout, farmed locally, became the flagship dish and a local economic engine.
Today the Laguna de La Cocha is one of the best-loved natural destinations in southern Colombia: a place to sail to La Corota, eat trout on the shore, visit the farmer-run reserves, watch birds and, above all, enjoy the serenity of a great Andean lake wrapped in mist. Its history is one of a balance sought between conservation, community and responsible tourism.
Long before its tourist fame, the La Cocha region was inhabited by Indigenous peoples of the Nariño plateau, in particular the Quillacinga, who occupied the cold lands around Pasto and the lake in pre-Hispanic times. For these peoples, bodies of water and mountains held strong sacred value, and the lake —whose name 'Cocha' has Quechua roots, an inheritance of Andean cultural expansion southward— formed part of their spiritual geography. The Quechua place names in the area reflect the influence of the Andean world arriving from the south, beyond today's border with Ecuador.
After the Spanish conquest and through the colonial and republican centuries, the area around the lake remained rural, cold and remote, hard to reach. The real transformation of the human landscape came in the 20th century, when colonists and farming families settled in the hamlets ringing the lake, clearing forest to open pasture and cropland in a process of agricultural colonization. The district of El Encano established itself as the main settlement on the water's edge.
That advance of the farming frontier into the Andean forest came to threaten the health of the ecosystem and of the lake itself. Growing awareness of that damage, well into the 20th century, was the seed of the remarkable community conservation movement that would later define La Cocha and that turned its farmers, once clearers of forest, into its guardians.
La Cocha's ecological value went beyond the local to win international recognition. On 18 April 2000, through Decree 698, the wetland complex of the Laguna de La Cocha was designated a Ramsar site, that is, a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention, the intergovernmental treaty for the conservation and wise use of the world's wetlands. It was the first Ramsar wetland in the Colombian Andean region and one of the country's first in páramo country, a seal recognizing the importance of the lake and its surrounding páramo and Andean forest for biodiversity and water regulation.
That designation rested largely on the earlier work of farming communities organized in the Asociación para el Desarrollo Campesino (ADC), whose 'civil society nature reserves' program had shown that conserving the Andean forest from within family farms was possible. The La Cocha model became a national and international reference for participatory conservation, in which protecting nature is not imposed by the state from outside but led by the territory's own inhabitants.
Today that recognition coexists with the challenges of tourism and the pressures on the ecosystem. The Laguna de La Cocha is at once a protected wetland of global value, a symbol of community conservation and one of the best-loved natural destinations in southern Colombia, where the history of its people —Indigenous, colonist and peasant— is woven together with that of the water, the mist and the forest around it.