The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta stands apart from the Andes, a lone triangle on Colombia's Caribbean coast that climbs from the beach to permanent snow at 5,700 metres in forty-two kilometres. On one flank you pass through every tropical climate in order: sand, jungle, cloud forest, páramo grassland and ice, band above band. Being cut off has made it a kind of island. Roughly two dozen bird species breed on this massif and nowhere else, along with frogs and plants that exist on one mountain and no other. The four peoples who live on it, the Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco and Kankuamo, call it the Heart of the World and themselves its Elder Brothers, charged with keeping the balance of the whole. Their spiritual leaders, the mámos, are chosen as infants and trained for years in near-darkness to read the natural order. They descend from the Tairona, and they are among the few peoples of the Americas never fully conquered.
The Tairona city is what most people come for. You reach Ciudad Perdida on foot and no other way: four days through humid jungle, fording rivers that run chest-deep in the wet months, sleeping in hammocks at camps along the trail. White-robed Kogi and Wiwa families share the path with you, the men carrying the poporo gourds in which they mix lime with coca leaf, and the hamlets you pass are lived in rather than shown. The walk ends at 1,200 mossy stone steps, and above them 169 green terraces float over the forest, the foundations of a town that held thousands. Jungle covered it for centuries until 1972, when treasure hunters climbed that stairway and began stripping the graves of gold; archaeologists traced the figurines back and reached the site in 1976. To the peoples of the mountain it had never gone anywhere. Higher up, the cloud forest of the San Lorenzo ridge is one of the great places on Earth for birds found nowhere else. One of them, the Santa Marta sabrewing, went unrecorded so long that it was feared extinct, until a birdwatcher photographed one in 2022.