Colombia

Colombia is a country in South America.

It has two seas. Tall mountains run through the middle. The capital city is Bogotá. It is high up in the mountains.

Colombia is a country in the northwest of South America. It is the only country in the Americas named after Christopher Columbus. Its north coast faces the Caribbean Sea, and its west coast faces the Pacific Ocean.

The Andes mountains split into three long ranges as they run through Colombia, with two great river valleys between them. Most people live in these mountains, where the air is cooler. The capital, Bogotá, is on a high, flat plateau. About 53.4 million people lived in Colombia in 2026, and Spanish is the official language.

Colombia occupies the northwestern corner of South America, with about 1,600 km of Caribbean coast to the north and 1,300 km of Pacific coast to the west; Panama, which divides the two bodies of water, borders it to the northwest. Britannica describes it as more than twice the size of France, and Wikidata gives about 1.14 million square kilometers. The San Andrés y Providencia archipelago lies off the Nicaraguan coast, some 650 km from the mainland.

North of Ecuador, the Andes flare out into three parallel ranges, the Cordilleras Occidental, Central and Oriental, separated by the valleys of the Magdalena and Cauca rivers. The population is concentrated in this mountainous interior. DANE, the national statistics office, projects 53,399,171 people for 2026 (series updated in July 2025 from the 2018 census), about three-quarters of them in cabeceras, the main towns of each municipality, and more than a third of Colombians live in the six largest metropolitan areas, of which Bogotá is the largest.

Bogotá is the biggest city in Colombia.

It is high in the mountains, so it is cool there. Cartagena is by the sea. It has old walls and forts. Medellín sits in a deep mountain valley.

Bogotá, the capital, was founded in 1538 on a high plateau in the eastern Andes, about 2,600 meters above the sea. It is cool all year, with an average temperature of about 14 °C. Its Gold Museum holds a huge collection of gold objects made by skilled Indigenous craftspeople long ago.

Medellín, Colombia's second city, lies in a deep valley in the central mountains, and Cali is the third most populous city. On the Caribbean coast, Cartagena was one of the most important ports in the Caribbean. The Spanish built forts and a wall around it, starting in 1586.

Bogotá, founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in 1538, stands on the Sabana de Bogotá in the Cordillera Oriental at an average of about 2,625 m by the city government's figure (Britannica gives 2,640 m), with an average temperature of 14 °C and about 223 days of precipitation a year. Bogotá, Medellín and Cali, all in the Andean region, are the three most populous cities; the Caribbean ports of Barranquilla, Cartagena and Santa Marta anchor the Atlantic lowlands, home to about a fifth of the population. Britannica describes the Gold Museum in Bogotá as holding the world's finest and largest collection of worked gold.

UNESCO inscribed Cartagena's port and fortifications in 1984 as the most extensive system of military fortifications in South America, begun by the Spanish in 1586 and extended in the 18th century. In the coffee region of the central Andes, the Coffee Cultural Landscape (2011) preserves farms on slopes steeper than 25 percent, shaped by Antioquian settlers who arrived in the 19th century and by farming ways passed down through the generations.

Colombia has very high mountains.

Some mountains are volcanoes. Some have snow on top, even near the Equator. Low down, it is hot and green. In the east there are big grassy plains and a huge rainforest.

Colombia is close to the Equator, so the temperature hardly changes through the year. Instead, it changes with height: low land is hot, the middle slopes are mild and good for coffee, and the high mountains are cold. Above about 4,600 meters there is snow and ice all year.

The highest peaks are the twin summits of Cristóbal Colón and Simón Bolívar, 5,775 meters high, in the Santa Marta Mountains near the Caribbean. East of the Andes lie the Llanos, wide grassy plains, and the Amazon rainforest. In the high, misty páramo grow strange, hairy-leaved plants called frailejones.

Britannica explains the cordilleras as thrust up by the subduction of the Nazca Plate and, to the north, the Caribbean Plate beneath the South American Plate, a process that still causes frequent earthquakes. The Cordillera Central carries some 20 volcanoes of the past 2.6 million years, the highest being Mount Huila (5,750 m) and the Ruiz-Tolima complex; in November 1985 Ruiz erupted, its melting snow and ice sent mudflows downslope, and the town of Armero was destroyed with more than 25,000 deaths. The isolated Santa Marta massif reaches 5,775 m at Cristóbal Colón and Simón Bolívar, the country's highest point.

The climate is tropical and nearly seasonless; temperature falls about 0.6 °C per 100 m of height, giving the familiar zones of tierra caliente, tierra templada (the coffee zone, 900-2,000 m) and tierra fría (2,000-3,000 m). Above them, the páramo of tussock grasses and the frailejón (Espeletia, some 50 species) reaches its greatest development in Colombia. East of the Andes, the Llanos form the largest savanna complex in tropical America, and the Amazon rainforest reaches its northern limit.

Colombia has so many birds.

It has many kinds of hummingbirds. Toucans live there too. Spectacled bears live in the forests. Jaguars and sloths live in the rainforest.

More than 1,500 kinds of birds live in Colombia, including toucans and many hummingbirds. Many birds live only in a narrow band of height on the mountainsides.

The forests of the Amazon and the Pacific coast are full of life: anteaters, sloths, monkeys, tapirs, capybaras, pumas and jaguars, and the spectacled bear, a bear of the Andes. Far out in the Pacific, the waters around Malpelo Island are a protected home for huge groups of sharks.

Britannica counts more than 1,500 bird species in Colombia, including toucans, the velvet-purple coronet and other hummingbirds, as well as migrants from North America; many species keep to narrow altitudinal bands. The forests of the Amazon and the Pacific Chocó hold anteaters, sloths, several monkey species, tapirs, peccaries, spectacled bears, agoutis, pacas and capybaras, with pumas and jaguars among the carnivores. Caimans, crocodiles, electric eels and earthworms up to about 1.8 m long also live there.

UNESCO lists Los Katíos National Park (1994) as the only place in South America where many Central American species occur, including the American crocodile, giant anteater and Central American tapir. Malpelo, about 500 km off the Pacific coast (inscribed 2006), protects the largest no-fishing zone in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, with major gatherings of hammerhead and silky sharks, 394 fish species and 17 marine mammal species.

Spanish is the main language of Colombia.

Some Indigenous people speak their own languages too. Many people like to eat arepas. They are round corn cakes. Lots of people love football. Cumbia is a famous kind of dance music.

Spanish is the main language of Colombia, and there are also more than 180 Indigenous languages and dialects. Many Colombians have mixed European and Indigenous ancestors, and many families on the coasts are of African descent.

Arepas, flat round cakes made of cornmeal, are a common breakfast or afternoon snack, often with a spicy sauce called ají. Music mixes Indigenous, Spanish and African sounds, in styles such as cumbia and vallenato. Football is the most popular sport, and every year the Carnival of Barranquilla fills the city with dancers, drum music and masks.

Britannica describes the population as largely mestizo, of mixed European and Indigenous descent, with substantial minorities of European and African ancestry; people of African descent live mainly in the coastal departments and the sugar-growing Cauca valley, and most people on the Pacific coast descend from liberated Africans. Castilian Spanish is the official language, alongside more than 180 Indigenous languages and dialects in families such as Arawakan, Chibchan and Cariban. Most people are Roman Catholic, and the constitution guarantees religious freedom.

Arepas, cornmeal cakes, are a common breakfast or snack, often served with ají; on the Caribbean coast street vendors deep-fry them with an egg inside. Cumbia and vallenato are among the most distinctive musical styles, and the national instrument is the 12-stringed tiple. The Carnival of Barranquilla, held in the four days before Lent, was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2003 and inscribed in 2008. Football is the most widely played sport, and tejo, a game similar to quoits, derives from the Chibcha people. Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.