Welcome to Colombia!

We start to get acclimatized in Colombia with a tour of the capital. The third highest capital city in the world, at an altitude of about 2.600 metres, Bogota receives us with an amazing colonial styled city centre. We’ll visit La Candelaria, we’ll go up to over 3.000 metres for a splendid view from Monserrate and we’ll dine together.

After breakfast, we’ll leave Bogota toward the East. The road will take us higher, toward some spectacular looking places. We’ll have great corners, mountain road stretches where we’ll enjoy an amazing view and we’ll descend to Ibague for lunch. After a coffee break in Calarca, we’ll ride the last stretch up to Armenia, one of the cities to visit in this part of Colombia.

The day starts with the morning coffee and we stay in the coffee area for a while. One of the world leaders in coffee production, Colombia lays before us a perfect place for motorcycle riding, but also great for learning about the fluid that fills our cups each morning. We’ll do a tour of a coffee farm in Filandia, we’ll go for lunch to Valle del Cocora, a peaceful green part of the country and we’ll end the day in Manizales, at the bottom of the Los Nevados National Park.

We leave the cool area for a spectacular road, full of corners, with great asphalt, which will take us toward Medellin. We’ll have a coffee break in Aranzazu and we continue the trip on a road which seems to have been designed to highlight the qualities of the GS.

The amazing transformation that Medellin underwent during the last few years is about to be unveiled. We visit Comuna 13, one of the most dangerous places in the world just a few decades ago, that became a completely changed neighbourhood, which is very tourist friendly right now. We’ll enjoy one of the most important art collections in Latin America in the Antioquia Museum, a place that hosts many of the works of the famous Fernando Botero.

We go North, which in Colombia means we’re going toward the warm places. A new day to combine corners, high altitude roads and mountain passes, places where we might go from rain to high temperature in a very short time. We’ll go through natural reservations where the indigenous tribes of Colombia still live and we’ll enjoy stretches of road which go through tens of kilometres of banana plantations.

Toward the Caribbean Sea, ladies and gentlemen! Temperatures rise as we close in on Cartagena. We’re still riding curvy roads in the first part, then we find straighter ones as we descend to an area of Colombia where there are lots of tourists all year round.

One of the most beautiful cities in Colombia, Cartagena mixes Colombian classics with elements of modern civilization in matters of entertainment. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Cartagena historical centre will be one of our objectives and we’ll enjoy both the urban area and the city’s beaches.

A new day, a new destination of historical importance for Colombia. Santa Cruz de Mompox, a city where we’ll really feel the heat from this area of Latin America, awaits us with a city centre where the colonial style houses were so well preserved that UNESCO awarded it the title of World Heritage Site since 1995.

We haven’t been exactly sparing our big words so far, but this is the day we arrive to what locals call “the most beautiful city in Colombia”. Barichara, a town with nothing else but colonial style buildings, placed near a huge canyon, will appear before us after a day of fun on mountain roads, with winding stretches of asphalt which will take us to heights that will allow us to admire this country’s beauty.

Since the most beautiful city in Colombia can’t be visited in just a few hours, we reserved a full day for this. We’ll learn about the way Colombia conserves and protects its historical sites, we’ll admire the colonial style houses that are restored with full respect of their original architecture, we’ll enjoy the gastronomic diversity of this region and we’ll fill our phones’ memory cards with pictures from the city.

We head for our point of departure without straying too far from the winding roads. Wider and more modern in this area, the roads that lead to Bogota will take us through a mountainous green landscape, where we’ll have frequent coffee breaks, lunch and visits to small towns of historical significance.