Top 10 Things to Do in Bogota

Monserrate is the 3,152-metre mountain that looms directly over Bogota's eastern edge, topped by a 17th-century white church shrine to the "Fallen Lord of Monserrate" that is one of Colombia's most important pilgrimage destinations and draws hundreds of thousands of devotees annually. The summit is reachable by cable car, funicular, or a steep 1,500-step pilgrim's path that pilgrims occasionally ascend on their knees as acts of devotion. The views from the top across Bogota's vast 10-million-person urban sprawl, framed by the eastern Andes, give an extraordinary sense of the city's scale and its precarious Andean setting.

La Candelaria is Bogota's oldest neighbourhood and historic heart — a dense grid of colonial whitewashed buildings and cobblestone plazas at the base of the eastern mountains where the city was founded by Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada in 1538. The barrio contains the Plaza de Bolivar flanked by the Capitol building, the primary cathedral, and the city's supreme court; the Botero Museum and the Gold Museum; and some of the most important colonial religious art collections in the Americas. Its walls are also covered in extraordinary political murals that make it one of Latin America's finest outdoor galleries of contemporary street art.

The Museo Botero in La Candelaria houses the world's largest collection of works by Fernando Botero — Colombia's most celebrated artist — after he donated 123 of his own monumental rounded figurative paintings and sculptures to the Colombian state in 2000, along with 85 works from his personal European collection including Picasso, Klimt, Chagall, Monet, and Renoir. The museum occupies a beautifully restored colonial mansion and is free to enter, making it the most democratic major art museum in South America. Botero's oversized figures of politicians, matadors, and mythological scenes rendered in his distinctive inflated style are simultaneously comic and profound.

Usaquen is a former colonial village absorbed by Bogota's northward expansion that has preserved its distinct character as a neighbourhood of cobblestoned plazas, antique shops, and excellent restaurants concentrated around the Parque de Usaquen and its Sunday flea market. The Sunday market is Bogota's finest — a genuine mix of antiques, artisan crafts, secondhand books, and street food stalls set beneath mature eucalyptus trees in one of the city's most photogenic squares. Usaquen's restaurant scene, anchored by several celebrated Colombian fine-dining establishments, makes it the go-to neighbourhood for a long, leisurely Sunday lunch.

The Salt Cathedral of Zipaquira, one hour north of Bogota, is an extraordinary underground cathedral carved into a working salt mine at 180 metres below ground, where Colombian miners began building shrines in the early 20th century and the current cathedral — completed in 1995 — contains 14 chapels of the Stations of the Cross carved from salt rock, a 75-metre-long central nave, and a 16-metre cross backlit with colour-changing LED lights. The cathedral can hold 10,000 worshippers and receives over 750,000 visitors annually, making it one of Colombia's most visited tourist sites. The salt mine itself has been worked for centuries and the walls glitter with crystalline mineral deposits.

Bogota's Ciclovia is the world's most celebrated urban cycling programme — every Sunday and public holiday from 7am to 2pm, 76 kilometres of the city's main arteries are closed to cars and opened exclusively to cyclists, joggers, rollerskaters, and pedestrians, drawing up to two million people per week in an event that has been copied by cities on six continents. Launched in 1974 during a fuel crisis, the Ciclovia has become a foundational piece of Bogota's civic identity and an embodiment of Mayor Enrique Penalosa's vision of the city as a space for people rather than vehicles. Joining the Ciclovia gives an immediate and joyful sense of the Colombian capital's energy and diversity.

The National Museum of Colombia is the country's oldest and largest museum, housed in a circular 19th-century prison known as "La Rotunda" — an extraordinary neoclassical building designed in 1874 by Thomas Reed that was repurposed as a museum in 1948. Its 20,000-object collection spans Colombian pre-Columbian archaeology, colonial religious art, independence-era portraiture, 20th-century painting, and ethnographic collections from Amazon and Pacific communities rarely seen outside of specialist institutions. The building itself — with its radial prison architecture preserved intact inside a grand museum context — is one of the most unusual and architecturally interesting museum buildings in South America.

Paloquemao is Bogota's largest and most vibrant central market — a vast covered complex in the city centre where flower vendors, fruit stalls, butchers, fishmongers, and cooked-food counters operate daily in a sensory whirlwind that represents the full biodiversity of Colombian produce. The flower section is the market's most famous feature: Colombian flower farmers display hundreds of varieties of roses, carnations, birds of paradise, and orchids at prices so low that buying armloads for a hotel room feels effortless. Arriving at dawn on a Saturday, when wholesale buyers and local chefs make their rounds through the fish and vegetable halls, is one of the great market experiences in Latin America.

Andres Carne de Res in the town of Chia, 30 kilometres north of Bogota, is one of the most extraordinary dining and nightlife experiences in the world — a fantastical multi-room complex that seats 4,000 people across a labyrinth of themed dining halls, dance floors, and private rooms decorated with thousands of antiques, hanging bicycles, religious iconography, and neon signs accumulated over 40 years of obsessive collecting by owner Andres Jaramillo. The restaurant has been operating since 1982 and morphs from a family Sunday lunch venue in the afternoon into one of South America's greatest nightclubs after midnight, with live music and DJ sets across multiple rooms until 4am. The menu runs to 60 pages of Colombian and international dishes, all of them good.

Monserrate is the 3,152-metre mountain that looms directly over Bogota's eastern edge, topped by a 17th-century white church shrine to the "Fallen Lord of Monserrate" that is one of Colombia's most important pilgrimage destinations and draws hundreds of thousands of devotees annually. The summit is reachable by cable car, funicular, or a steep 1,500-step pilgrim's path that pilgrims occasionally ascend on their knees as acts of devotion. The views from the top across Bogota's vast 10-million-person urban sprawl, framed by the eastern Andes, give an extraordinary sense of the city's scale and its precarious Andean setting.

La Candelaria is Bogota's oldest neighbourhood and historic heart — a dense grid of colonial whitewashed buildings and cobblestone plazas at the base of the eastern mountains where the city was founded by Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada in 1538. The barrio contains the Plaza de Bolivar flanked by the Capitol building, the primary cathedral, and the city's supreme court; the Botero Museum and the Gold Museum; and some of the most important colonial religious art collections in the Americas. Its walls are also covered in extraordinary political murals that make it one of Latin America's finest outdoor galleries of contemporary street art.

The Museo Botero in La Candelaria houses the world's largest collection of works by Fernando Botero — Colombia's most celebrated artist — after he donated 123 of his own monumental rounded figurative paintings and sculptures to the Colombian state in 2000, along with 85 works from his personal European collection including Picasso, Klimt, Chagall, Monet, and Renoir. The museum occupies a beautifully restored colonial mansion and is free to enter, making it the most democratic major art museum in South America. Botero's oversized figures of politicians, matadors, and mythological scenes rendered in his distinctive inflated style are simultaneously comic and profound.

Usaquen is a former colonial village absorbed by Bogota's northward expansion that has preserved its distinct character as a neighbourhood of cobblestoned plazas, antique shops, and excellent restaurants concentrated around the Parque de Usaquen and its Sunday flea market. The Sunday market is Bogota's finest — a genuine mix of antiques, artisan crafts, secondhand books, and street food stalls set beneath mature eucalyptus trees in one of the city's most photogenic squares. Usaquen's restaurant scene, anchored by several celebrated Colombian fine-dining establishments, makes it the go-to neighbourhood for a long, leisurely Sunday lunch.

The Salt Cathedral of Zipaquira, one hour north of Bogota, is an extraordinary underground cathedral carved into a working salt mine at 180 metres below ground, where Colombian miners began building shrines in the early 20th century and the current cathedral — completed in 1995 — contains 14 chapels of the Stations of the Cross carved from salt rock, a 75-metre-long central nave, and a 16-metre cross backlit with colour-changing LED lights. The cathedral can hold 10,000 worshippers and receives over 750,000 visitors annually, making it one of Colombia's most visited tourist sites. The salt mine itself has been worked for centuries and the walls glitter with crystalline mineral deposits.

Bogota's Ciclovia is the world's most celebrated urban cycling programme — every Sunday and public holiday from 7am to 2pm, 76 kilometres of the city's main arteries are closed to cars and opened exclusively to cyclists, joggers, rollerskaters, and pedestrians, drawing up to two million people per week in an event that has been copied by cities on six continents. Launched in 1974 during a fuel crisis, the Ciclovia has become a foundational piece of Bogota's civic identity and an embodiment of Mayor Enrique Penalosa's vision of the city as a space for people rather than vehicles. Joining the Ciclovia gives an immediate and joyful sense of the Colombian capital's energy and diversity.

The National Museum of Colombia is the country's oldest and largest museum, housed in a circular 19th-century prison known as "La Rotunda" — an extraordinary neoclassical building designed in 1874 by Thomas Reed that was repurposed as a museum in 1948. Its 20,000-object collection spans Colombian pre-Columbian archaeology, colonial religious art, independence-era portraiture, 20th-century painting, and ethnographic collections from Amazon and Pacific communities rarely seen outside of specialist institutions. The building itself — with its radial prison architecture preserved intact inside a grand museum context — is one of the most unusual and architecturally interesting museum buildings in South America.

Paloquemao is Bogota's largest and most vibrant central market — a vast covered complex in the city centre where flower vendors, fruit stalls, butchers, fishmongers, and cooked-food counters operate daily in a sensory whirlwind that represents the full biodiversity of Colombian produce. The flower section is the market's most famous feature: Colombian flower farmers display hundreds of varieties of roses, carnations, birds of paradise, and orchids at prices so low that buying armloads for a hotel room feels effortless. Arriving at dawn on a Saturday, when wholesale buyers and local chefs make their rounds through the fish and vegetable halls, is one of the great market experiences in Latin America.

Andres Carne de Res in the town of Chia, 30 kilometres north of Bogota, is one of the most extraordinary dining and nightlife experiences in the world — a fantastical multi-room complex that seats 4,000 people across a labyrinth of themed dining halls, dance floors, and private rooms decorated with thousands of antiques, hanging bicycles, religious iconography, and neon signs accumulated over 40 years of obsessive collecting by owner Andres Jaramillo. The restaurant has been operating since 1982 and morphs from a family Sunday lunch venue in the afternoon into one of South America's greatest nightclubs after midnight, with live music and DJ sets across multiple rooms until 4am. The menu runs to 60 pages of Colombian and international dishes, all of them good.