Bogota: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Everything Spanish in Bogota is in about nine blocks on a slope, and the slope is the thing to prepare for: you are at two thousand six hundred and forty metres, the air holds about a quarter less oxygen than at sea level, and a staircase that would be nothing at home will stop you. Walk it slowly and downhill where you can. Two and a half hours, and carry a jacket whatever the sky is doing at breakfast.

A short history of Bogota

The Muisca lived on the high plateau and called the place Bacatá. In 1538 the conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada founded the Spanish city here, at an altitude of about 2,600 metres. In the colonial period it was the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. In 1819 Simón Bolívar entered the city after his victory at the Battle of Boyacá. On 9 April 1948 the political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated here, and in the riots that followed, known as the "Bogotazo", part of the city centre was burnt down. The city's Gold Museum holds more than 50,000 objects from pre-Columbian cultures.

The ten best sights in Bogota

1
Plaza de Bolivar
Four sides, four centuries, four powers: cathedral, parliament, supreme court and city hall. The court building you see is from 1999 because the one before it burned in 1985.
2
Catedral Primada
The fourth cathedral on the spot: the first three fell down. Jimenez de Quesada, who founded the city, is buried in it.
3
Museo del Oro
Fifty-five thousand gold pieces, the largest such collection anywhere, and the Muisca raft is the one object to find. Free on Sundays and worth two hours any day.
4
Museo Botero
Botero gave the bank a hundred and twenty-three of his own works and eighty-five Picassos, Monets and Dalis from his collection, on one condition: free entry forever.
5
Museo Nacional
Housed in a panopticon prison from 1874, built so one guard could see every cell. The cells are now galleries and the shape is still obvious.
6
Museo Santa Clara
A convent church from 1647 with a hundred and forty-eight paintings and every surface gilded. The nuns were enclosed and heard mass through a grille.
7
Teatro Colon
Opened 1892 for the four hundredth anniversary of the Columbus voyage, with a ceiling by an Italian painter and eight hundred seats. Take the daytime tour if there is no show.
8
Casa de Narino
The presidential palace, and the guard change is at four. You see it from the street only; the block is closed.
9
Capitolio Nacional
Begun in 1848 and finished in 1926: seventy-eight years, through four civil wars that kept stopping the work.
10
Palacio de Justicia
M-19 guerrillas seized the old building in November 1985 and the army retook it with tanks. About a hundred died, including eleven of the twenty-five supreme court justices.

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What is an audio walk?

Tours in Bogota →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Bogota:

Free walking tours in Bogota

La Candelaria

Plaza de Bolivar · Four sides hold the cathedral, the parliament, the supreme court and the city hall, which makes this the only square in the country where all four powers face each other. The court building is from 1999 because the one before it was destroyed in November 1985, when M-19 guerrillas seized it and the army retook it with tanks; the fire took the case files along with about a hundred lives.
Casa del Florero corner · On the north-east corner of this square, on the twentieth of July 1810, a Creole asked a Spanish official to lend a flower vase for a visiting dignitary. The official refused rudely, the crowd took it as the insult it was, and the row became the declaration of independence. The twentieth of July is the national day, and the vase is in the museum on that corner.
Museo Botero · Fernando Botero handed the national bank a hundred and twenty-three of his own works, plus eighty-five pieces by Picasso, Monet, Degas and Dali from his private collection, and attached one condition in writing: the museum must never charge admission. It never has.
Chorro de Quevedo · This is where chicha is sold, the fermented maize beer the Muisca were drinking here before the Spanish arrived. It was banned outright in 1948, immediately after the Bogotazo riots, on the official grounds that it caused disorder; the ban held for decades and chicha survived in these few streets. It is legal again and served in a painted gourd.
Iglesia de San Francisco · The oldest church still standing in Bogota, from the fifteen hundreds, and the only colonial building here that has never had to be rebuilt. Behind it runs Avenida Jimenez, where the emerald trade is conducted on the pavement: dealers fold stones into squares of paper, price them by eye, and settle in cash in the open.
Museo del Oro · Fifty-five thousand gold objects, the largest collection of its kind anywhere, and almost none of it was treasure. The Muisca worked gold for offerings and threw it into lakes, which is a use the Spanish could not understand and the reason so much of it survived underwater. Find the Muisca raft: a small gold piece from a cave near Pasca, found in 1969, showing a chief and his attendants on a reed boat.

The Hill and the Ninth of April

Two things shaped this city and both are on this route: the mountain it is pinned against, and a murder on Carrera Septima in 1948. The hill gives you the only honest view of how big and how high Bogota is. The street gives you why Colombia spent the next seventy years in a war. Half a day, with the funicular, and go up in the morning before the cloud comes down over the ridge.

Quinta de Bolivar · The republic gave this country house to Simon Bolivar in 1820 and he hardly used it; he was at war or governing elsewhere for almost all of the time he owned it. In 1828 an assassination attempt was made on him in Bogota and he escaped through a window. He left the city in 1830, resigned everything, and died in Santa Marta that December.
Funicular de Monserrate · The funicular has run since 1929 and climbs through forest in about four minutes. Before it, the only way up was the stone staircase of roughly fifteen hundred steps, which pilgrims still use on foot. The cable car was added in 1955 so one could keep running while the other was serviced.
Santuario de Monserrate · At three thousand one hundred and fifty-two metres, the sanctuary holds the Senor Caido, a Christ carved in 1656 showing him fallen under the cross rather than on it. That is the point of the pilgrimage: people come to a figure who is down, not triumphant. On Good Friday the staircase carries tens of thousands.
Carrera Septima · At about one in the afternoon on the ninth of April 1948, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was shot dead on this street as he left his office. He was the Liberal front-runner for the presidency and the most popular politician in the country. The city centre burned for days. Estimates of the dead in Bogota alone run from several hundred to several thousand, and no agreed figure exists.
Casa Museo Gaitan · His house is kept as it was on the day, down to the books. What followed the killing was La Violencia, roughly a decade of rural killing between Liberals and Conservatives that took in the region of two hundred thousand lives and produced the armed groups that fought for the next fifty years. A Cuban law student named Fidel Castro was in Bogota that week for a student congress and was caught in the riot.
Centro de Memoria · A deliberately plain building beside the central cemetery, for the victims of the armed conflict. The registry behind the peace process counts more than nine million victims, the large majority of them displaced from their land rather than killed, which is the part of this war that is least visible from a capital city.

The City They Rebuilt

In the nineteen-nineties Bogota had one of the worst reputations of any capital on earth, and then two mayors changed it on purpose — not with money, which there was not much of, but with rules, buses and bicycles. This route is the result, and the best of it only exists on a Sunday morning. Three hours, mostly flat, in the north.

Ciclovia on Carrera Septima · Every Sunday and public holiday from seven in the morning until two, about a hundred and twenty kilometres of main road close to cars entirely. Something like a million people use it: cyclists, runners, skaters, dog walkers, families with prams. It has run since 1974, it costs almost nothing, and it has been copied by cities on every continent under the name open streets.
TransMilenio · Bogota could not afford a metro, so in the year 2000 it built one out of buses: articulated vehicles in physically separated lanes, with raised stations, doors that line up with the platform, and fares paid before boarding. It moves more people per hour than many light railways, it became the global model for bus rapid transit, and it is also badly overcrowded because the city grew faster than the system. The first actual metro line is being built now.
Parque Simon Bolivar · Larger than Central Park, and the city free concert ground. Rock al Parque has run here since 1995 and is one of the largest free music festivals in Latin America, which was itself a policy: the city put on a festival for the young men it was accused of being unable to control.
Jardin Botanico · The collection is built around the paramo, the wet high moorland above the tree line that exists in only a handful of places on earth and which acts as a sponge: it holds rainfall and releases it slowly, and it is where Bogota drinking water comes from. Drain the paramo and the city has no water, which is why it is now a political subject and not a botanical one.
Usaquen · A separate village until 1954, when Bogota annexed it along with five other towns and doubled its own size overnight. The Sunday flea market around the square is the one place in the wealthy north that still feels like a town rather than a development.
Mercado de Paloquemao · Come at five in the morning for the flower hall. Colombia is the second largest exporter of cut flowers in the world after the Netherlands, and the altitude is the reason: twelve hours of equatorial daylight all year at two thousand six hundred metres grows a rose with a thick stem and a long vase life. Most roses sold in North America on Valentine Day grew on this plateau.

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Getting to Bogota and getting around

El Dorado Airport · Thirteen kilometres west and the busiest airport in South America by cargo. Named after the ceremony, not the city that never existed.
Terminal Salitre · The main intercity terminal, colour-coded by direction of travel. Buses here go everywhere in Colombia and some rides are eighteen hours.
TransMilenio Portal Norte · TransMilenio is buses in dedicated lanes with raised stations and pre-paid boarding, opened in 2000 because a metro was unaffordable. Avoid it at seven and at six.
Las Aguas station · The end of the line and the stop for the old town and the funicular. Walk down from here, not up.
Funicular de Monserrate · The 1929 funicular climbs through the forest in four minutes. The cable car runs when the funicular does not, and the queue on a Sunday is two hours.

Cheap eats in Bogota

Bogota food is cold-country food, which surprises people who expect the Caribbean: this is a plateau at two thousand six hundred metres where the temperature is fourteen degrees all year, and the cooking is soups, potatoes, maize and hot drinks. There are three thousand varieties of potato in the Andes and this city uses several in one bowl on purpose. The counter to eat at is a plaza de mercado — a covered neighbourhood market with lunch stalls upstairs — or a window on the street. Two to five dollars a plate, and the thing to order before anything else is ajiaco.

Ajiaco · The soup of this city: chicken, three potatoes, corn on the cob, capers and cream, four dollars
Chicha · Fermented maize beer, pre-Columbian, banned in 1948 and legal again; served in a painted gourd
Tamal santafereno · Sunday breakfast: maize dough, chicken, pork and a whole egg steamed in banana leaf
Changua · Milk broth with a poached egg, spring onion and stale bread; a hangover breakfast and a dollar
Arepa de choclo · A sweet fresh-corn pancake folded over melting cheese, off a griddle on the street; a dollar
Canelazo and aguardiente · Hot panela water with cinnamon and a shot of anise spirit; the drink the cold here invented
Fritanga · A platter of everything fried: blood sausage, chorizo, potato, plantain and crackling, to share
Obleas · Two thin wafers with arequipe caramel between them, from a cart, assembled in front of you
Fruit you have never seen · Lulo, feijoa, guanabana, curuba, mangostino, granadilla; ask for a tasting and they will cut them
Tinto on the street · Weak black coffee from a man with a thermos, thirty cents, and it is not good coffee on purpose

Museums in Bogota

Bogota has one museum of world rank and it is about gold that was never money. The Muisca of this plateau worked gold into figures and threw them into lakes as offerings, which is a use of gold the Spanish could not understand and spent three centuries trying to recover. That single misunderstanding produced the legend of El Dorado, several drained lakes, and the largest gold collection on earth. Everything else here is free or nearly free: Botero gave his away on condition of it, and the Banco de la Republica runs three museums in one block.

Museo del Oro · Fifty-five thousand pieces; find the Muisca raft and the offering room on the top floor
Museo Botero · Free forever by his written condition; a hundred and twenty-three Boteros and eighty-five others
Museo Nacional · In a panopticon prison from 1874; the cells are galleries and the geometry still reads
Museo Santa Clara · A 1647 convent church, a hundred and forty-eight paintings, and every surface gilded
Museo de Bogota · How a Muisca village became a city of eight million; small, free, and the maps are the point
Casa Museo Gaitan · Kept as it was in April 1948; he is buried in the garden and the house is the archive
Museo de Arte Moderno · By Rogelio Salmona, the architect who decided Bogota would be brick; the ramp is the building
Museo Militar · Free, in a colonial house, and you leave your passport at the door; four civil wars room by room

Nature and day trips near Bogota

Bogota sits in a bowl at two thousand six hundred and forty metres with a wall of mountains along its eastern edge, and the altitude is the whole story: it is fourteen degrees every day of the year, there are no seasons, and there are two rainy spells instead. Above the city on the ridge begins the paramo, a wet high moorland that exists almost nowhere else on earth and which supplies the drinking water. And ten minutes past the ridge the land falls two thousand metres into cloud forest.

Monserrate · Three thousand one hundred and fifty-two metres; the only place the scale of the city is visible
Jardin Botanico · Built around the paramo, the moorland sponge that holds the water the city drinks
Parque Natural Chicaque · Cloud forest twenty-three kilometres out, where the plateau edge drops two thousand metres
Laguna de Guatavita · The actual El Dorado; a perfectly round lake in a crater, and people have tried to empty it twice
Salto del Tequendama · A hundred and fifty metres where the river leaves the plateau; the water is foul and the story is not
Suesca · Where Colombian rock climbing began; a sandstone wall several kilometres long by the old railway
La Calera ridge road · Over the eastern wall; the road up is where the city goes to look back at itself after dark
Parque El Virrey · A canal park in the north; runners from six, and the easiest place to feel the altitude honestly

Holy places in Bogota

Three layers sit on this plateau. The Muisca were here first and their religion ran on water: lakes were doorways, gold went into them, and salt was their trade currency. The Spanish arrived in 1538, built churches on top and spent three centuries looking for a city of gold that was a misheard ceremony. And then the twentieth century added its own object of pilgrimage: the ninth of April 1948, which Colombians treat with something close to religious weight because everything after it came out of it.

Catedral de Sal de Zipaquira · A church carved a hundred and eighty metres underground inside a working salt mine
Laguna de Guatavita · The lake the offerings went into; this is the real El Dorado and it is a body of water
Santuario de Monserrate · The Fallen Christ, carved 1656; pilgrims climb fifteen hundred steps and some finish on their knees
Iglesia de San Francisco · The oldest surviving church in the city, from the fifteen hundreds, and still a working parish
Iglesia de San Agustin · Shelled during the civil war of 1862; the damage was repaired but never disguised
Iglesia de la Concepcion · From the fifteen hundreds with a Mudejar wooden ceiling, wedged between shops on a busy street
Cementerio Central · From 1836, and the political history of the republic lying in one field
Villa de Leyva · A whitewashed colonial town with the largest cobbled square on the continent, and a monastery in it

Things to do in Bogota with kids

Bogota is an easier city with children than it looks, for one specific reason: on Sundays a hundred and twenty kilometres of road belong to bicycles, and a six-year-old can ride down the middle of the main avenue of a capital city. Everything else follows from that. The altitude is the thing to respect — small children feel it as tiredness rather than breathlessness, so plan half the day you would plan at home.

Ciclovia · Sunday seven until two, main roads closed to cars; bicycles for rent along the route
Maloka · A science centre mostly underground with a dome cinema; built for touching things
Planetario de Bogota · Next to the bullring and the park; shows in Spanish and the dome does the work
Funicular de Monserrate · Four minutes up through forest in a sloping carriage; the cable car is the scarier option
Parque Simon Bolivar · Bigger than Central Park with a lake and pedal boats; go on a Sunday with the Ciclovia
Jardin Botanico · Glasshouses, a butterfly house and the woolly frailejon plants from the moorland
Museo del Oro top floor · The offering room is a dark circle that lights up; it works on children better than on adults
Catedral de Sal · A hundred and eighty metres down in a salt mine, lit in colours, and the walls taste of salt

Nightlife in Bogota

Bogota has three nights and they are in different parts of town. La Candelaria is students, chicha and cheap rum in colonial rooms. Chapinero is the most visible gay district in the Andes and the loudest cheap night. The Zona T and Parque 93 in the north are the expensive version with bottle service. The thing to know first is the altitude: alcohol is widely reported to hit harder at two thousand six hundred metres, and the second thing is that nothing starts before eleven.

Tejo · The national sport: throw a metal disc at gunpowder packets and they explode. Free with beer
Chapinero · Students, cheap bars, and the most visible gay quarter in the Andes; Thursday is the real night
Zona T · Two pedestrian streets crossing in a T; the expensive night and the one with queues
Parque de la 93 · Restaurants and bars round a square in the north; safe, pleasant, and nothing surprising
La Candelaria bars · Colonial rooms, students, chicha in a gourd and rum; the cheapest night in the city
Salsa and the Cali question · Bogota dances salsa but Cali is the salsa city, and a Bogotano will admit it
Aguardiente by the half bottle · Anise cane spirit, bought by the bottle for the table with a bucket of ice and small cups
Septimazo on a Thursday · Carrera Septima fills with street performers on Thursday evenings; free and entirely local

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Frequently asked questions about Bogota

What is there to see in Bogota?

The top sights in Bogota are Plaza de Bolivar, Catedral Primada and Museo del Oro. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Bogota?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Bogota without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Bogota?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Bogota, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: La Candelaria.

How do you get to Bogota and get around?

The main ways are El Dorado Airport, Terminal Salitre and TransMilenio Portal Norte. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Bogota, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Bogota that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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