High altitude, warmer people than you expect, and the world's best coffee
South America's third-largest city sits at 2,600 meters in the Andean cloud belt — perpetually cool, often misty, and almost always surprising. Bogotá has reinvented itself from one of the most dangerous cities in the world in the 1990s to a genuine cultural destination: the La Candelaria colonial neighborhood is plastered floor-to-ceiling in political street murals, the Gold Museum holds 55,000 pre-Columbian gold artifacts, and the Sunday Ciclovía closes 120km of city streets to cars so residents can cycle freely.
Founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in 1538 on the high Sabana plain of the Muisca people, Bogotá became capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. The city gained notoriety in the 1980s–90s at the height of Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel's power, when the murder rate was among the highest in the world. Mayor Enrique Peñalosa's urban transformation in the late 1990s — the Ciclovía, the TransMilenio bus rapid transit, and public library expansions — became a globally studied model of urban turnaround.