2 min summary Best time to visit Map & highlights Food & drink Cities Caribbean coast Lost city trek Zona Cafetera San Agustin Cycling Tips Responsible tourism

Slow travel in Colombia

Slow travel in Colombia swaps rushed, flight-filled itineraries for scenic overland journeys and longer stays. With more time comes more rewards: garden tastings, graffiti tours with hip hop artists, strolls through flowering rainforests, and savouring beach sunsets – most likely with a limonada de coco in hand. Plus, it’s all wrapped up in a lower-carbon bow.

Home\South America\Colombia

Slow travel in Colombia

What connects a chicha tasting, a mountain road, a graffiti workshop and a potato museum? They’re all invitations to embrace slow travel in Colombia, where short domestic flights are swapped for remarkable road trips and where a tasting is never just a tasting.

Take Bogota: with time on your side, you can stroll Bolivar Square and the Gold Museum – and still spare a day or two for perusing Paloquemao Market, chicha tasting with a little local cooperative, and a private graffiti tour that tells the political and Indigenous stories behind La Candelaria’s towering murals. In Medellin, meanwhile, you can take the city’s beloved cable car up to Arvi Park and visit a coffee farm – and still spend a couple of nights at a lodge in a nearby cloud forest where scarlet and lime parrots flash through the trees.

Plus, with slow travel, the journeys aren’t just about getting from A to B. They’re carefully plotted routes designed to cut carbon-heavy flights and the fuss that goes with them – and all while diving into the flowering rainforests, misty mountains and green savannah that many visitors miss.

See all our Colombia Vacations

Give us a call

Ditching flights for transformational travel

Colombia is huge – over four times the size of the UK – with a brilliant network of low-cost airlines that make it very tempting to skip between the classic triad of Bogota, Medellin and Cartagena.

But there’s just one thing – you’re missing out on all the places and people in between. “There are amazing things to see if you travel by land,” says Sam Gough, from our slow travel experts, Travel Differently. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else in South America that has a similar landscape... It’s an incredibly beautiful part of the world.”

When you skip the flights, you get the chance to drive – or hike, or even cycle – through green mountains where the tropical climate encourages sculptural passion flowers and dangling angel’s trumpets to flourish. You’ll see hummingbird-filled cloud forests, watery paramos moorlands, orange arid forests, the snaking Amazon, Caribbean coastlines, and coffee valleys crowned by the world’s tallest palms.

It’s so much more enjoyable; so much more immersive. You feel much more of a connection with where you are.

“It’s nice to have that down time, look out the window, enjoy the view, and then move on to the next place,” says Sam. “It’s about spending time.”

Wherever you go, our slow travel trips are run by local experts who plan the most scenic routes while keeping safety front of mind. So where overland travel isn’t advisable, flights will be arranged.

The food transforms with the scenery, giving you the chance to hop off for a farm lunch in the mountain highlands, see how coffee, caramel and chocolate are made around Medellin and the Cocora Valley, or feast on seafood along the Caribbean coast. Outside the capsule of a plane, there are more chances to chat with people en route – fruit vendors, chefs, community activists, farmers, artists and Indigenous people.

“You get to experience more of local life – to get to feel what makes the country really special,” says Sam. “It’s so much more enjoyable; so much more immersive. You feel much more of a connection with where you are.”

Contact Us

Call us for a chat about our vacations. We are happy to discuss your vacation and help in any way we can. No bots, queues or awful hold music.

1-866-821-6866 1-866-821-6866

Call toll free

Calling from outside the USA

rosy@responsibletravel.com

Best slow travel experiences in Colombia

Most of our slow travel trips are tailor made, so our experts can shape the itinerary around your interests – whether that’s radical potato museums, weaving workshops, horse riding or wildlife watching. We’ve lined up a few of our favorite slow travel experiences in Colombia to inspire you…

Learn about potatoes & protest in Boyaca

The Native Potato Biomuseum of Boyaca is home to a family of farmers successfully reintroducing local species that US multinationals tried to stamp out. Marvel at the multi-coloured potato varieties and the dyes they create, go on a sensory walk through edible gardens, and taste fresh crops in the company of the people who grow them. It doesn’t take long to realise this isn’t just a museum: it’s a celebration of resilience in the Andean highlands – a sweeping epic that covers colonisation, farmers’ rebellions, strikes, protests and sabotage. “It’s all the stuff that I love about Latin America – that made me fall in love with it in the first place,” says Sam. “The pride and the spirit; the local people who won’t be told what to do… It’s about this experience, but it’s also teaching you what’s been happening over the last 20 years.”

Get a taste of ranch life in Yopal

Yopal, in Colombia’s east, marks the center of llanero cowboy culture. You’re invited to stay at a working ranch with families and friends who have lived, worked, eaten and socialised together for generations. Learn about centuries-old farming methods that remain machine-free, from milking to working in the corral, and sign up to a wildlife trip on rolling hills and savannah-like plains. In true llanero tradition, tours are on horseback – the best way to see vehicle-shy anteaters, capybaras, anacondas and, if you’re really lucky, pumas.

Cycle from city streets to mountains

Bogota is celebrating over 50 years of Ciclovia, when streets are closed to most traffic on Sunday mornings. It’s a great time to explore the city by bike. We can also take you out into the countryside, where some of the world’s best cyclists train and roads sweep between coffee plantations, rainforests and alpine mountains. That said, for all the mighty scenery, cyclists often come away with one favorite memory: the roadside fruit stall. Fresh pineapples, papayas, coconuts and bananas keep you well-supplied with delicious snacks and juices.

Weave with the masters

Villa de Leyva is one of the most popular stops in Colombia, but not many stay long enough to learn weaving secrets from a master artisan. However, slow travel carves out time to visit an 18^th-century cotton loom to learn Indigenous Muisca weaving techniques. Alternatively, head to a sheep farm to have a go at making the ubiquitous all-weather ruana ponchos that are a symbol of life in the Colombian Andes. It’s all wrapped up with a traditional highland lunch – perhaps a slow-cooked pork and potato stew.

Tour Comuna 13 with a hip hop artist

Instead of tagging on to the ever-growing crowds of Medellin’s Comuna 13, join a local guide for a tour of a quieter part of the barrio popular to see lesser-visited artworks that tell tales of renewal and resistance. Our tours also put you in touch with a community leader who runs free hip hop and graffiti workshops for local people. “The workshops are named after his childhood friend who was killed by a gang, and so you learn about the history of this area, but you do it by going to his graffiti workshop,” says Sam. “It’s far more immersive, far more memorable.”

Be inspired by forest lodges with botanical gardens

Medellin is all big city energy, but just outside the city limits lies a dramatic world of mountain peaks and valleys. Amongst this spectacular scenery, there are boutique ecolodges run by people passionate about nature and regenerative farming systems like permaculture. “I’ve been to so many ecolodges and seen their special gardens, but it was fascinating – proper permaculture,” says Sam, remembering staying at a lodge in the Valley of Saint Nicolas. “All the plants were working in harmony with each other…. I now do it in my garden.”

Meet the artists of Barichara

Barichara is often cited as one of Colombia’s prettiest towns, with swooping cobblestone streets and sweeping views along the valley. “It’s incredibly beautiful and it feels like an artists’ colony,” says Sam. “Everybody there is an artist, or a poet, or a musician, or a weaver, or a cook. It’s this amazingly creative little town.” Many people visit, but not so many stay long enough to book an appointment with a creative, learning how to make paper from pineapple plants or tasting the creamy sabajon liqueur.

Go chicha & beer tasting in Bogota

Chicha tastings offer a relaxed appreciation of Colombia’s most storied beverage, covering everything from its origins as a wisdom-giving drink of the Muisca people to nationwide bans and the survival of secreted-away family recipes. “It was amazing to hear how it related to the cultural history of the whole country,” says Sam. “They combine the important historical and cultural messages that you need to understand, right up to the present day, but while having fun and doing something new.”

Hike to the Indigenous village of Tayku

Most people drive to the Indigenous village of Tayku, on the edge of Tayrona National Natural Park, but we recommend making the journey part of the adventure. Hike with an approved local guide who’ll lead you along ancestral trails that have been used for thousands of years, through rainforest-cloaked mountains. The Kogi people will welcome you with a drink and a village tour, along with a chat about life in the tropical rainforests of the Sierra Nevada. As sunset approaches, the nearby Caribbean city of Santa Marta calls – and so do its sandside beach clubs and bars.