Tayrona is the stretch of Colombia's Caribbean coast where the highest coastal mountain range on Earth comes down to the sea. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta carries snow at 5,700 metres just 42 kilometres inland, and this shore is all pieces of it. The boulders stacked along the coves are its granite core, rounded underground as water rotted the stone inward from the corners, then left piled at the water as the softer rock washed away. House-sized, they frame the golden coves between them. Where reefs offshore break the swell, at La Piscina and Cabo San Juan, the sea is clear and calm and you can get in. Where they do not, the currents are strong enough to kill, and the beach is for looking at.
The only way you reach most of it is on foot. From the Zaino gate the trail climbs and dips through hot coastal rainforest, roots underfoot and birdsong overhead, and takes you to Cabo San Juan in an hour or two. The canopy on the way is busy: iguanas along the branches, troops of monkeys crossing overhead, and sometimes a cotton-top tamarin. That one is squirrel-sized under a shock of white hair, lives only in northern Colombia, and is down to a few thousand in the wild. Most people end the day at the thatched hut on the rocky point, hammocks strung in a row under one roof, a cove breaking on either side of you. Staying the night empties the beaches: the day walkers are gone by dusk, and the coves stay quiet until the first boats arrive. The people who built the stone-terraced towns along this coast withdrew high into the Sierra as the Spanish pressed in around 1600, and their descendants are still up there: the Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco and Kankuamo. Several times a year the gates shut for a fortnight at their request. It is not maintenance. Their mamos, the spiritual leaders, spend the weeks making offerings to rebalance sea, mountain and river, and the mountain is left to rest.