In late December and January I spent 3 weeks travelling across (parts of) Colombia by public transport. I covered 5 WHS, 5 TWHS and some places of interest in between. I found a country that often reminded me of what Cuba could have looked like without having taken the communist path. Find below my top tips for travelling to Colombia as a World Heritage Traveller.

My favourite WHS in Colombia: San Agustín

1. Only 5 out of the 9 WHS are fairly accessible

Colombia to date has gained 9 WHS, of which only 5 can be viewed as "accessible" (and even of those Mompox and Tierradentro require some off the beaten track travel). Qhapaq Nan as a serial transnational site may easily be picked up in another country, but the locations in Colombia are in a remote zone near the Ecuadorian border. Chiribiquete NP is closed to all visitors - I may have counted the fly-over tour if I had been lucky enough to secure a spot, but all spaces were filled when I inquired 3 months before. Malpelo seems to be only accessible by liveaboard dive trips and has so far only been visited by Don Parrish , a.k.a. …

A visit to Cartagena does leave you with mixed feelings. On the one hand it is Colombia’s most vibrant city which also has preserved its historical core. On the other hand it is so fully geared to tourism that sooner or later you will get fed up with it, trying to fend off the stream of sellers of water and hats and avoid the ubiquitous tour groups. I had about 2 full days there, which I found a good amount of time. When you walk away a bit from the clock tower area and the busiest parts of the historic center, it certainly gets enjoyable. The city also has an accessible and low-key airport with long haul connections, for example to Amsterdam, New York and Lima.

The town’s OUV mostly is about its military fortresses and port. So on my first morning in the city I walked via the bridge from the center to the big fort on the other side of the bay. The Fort San Felipe de Barajas opens at 8 a.m. and I was one of the first visitors of the day, so it was …

Mompox is a bit of logistical nightmare (not the only one in Colombia). I studied different routes beforehand, but in the end I couldn’t think of anything better than taking a bus there from Cartagena and take the same one back 2 days later. The Unitransco bus turned out to be the most luxury one of my Colombia trip – with comfy reclining seats, wifi, toilet and no stops other than in 2 or 3 towns to pick up/drop off passengers. The ride took about 6.5 hours. Google Maps and maps.me totally lost track of the route in the maze of swamps and (former) islands, spitting out various incorrect times of arrival. For the last 1.5 hours the bus takes a really minor road.

Colombia does not have many well-preserved Spanish-colonial remains. But Mompox surely is one of them. It was founded in 1537, less than 40 years after the first Europeans set foot on the South American mainland. Its historic center is beautifully restored and very cozy. It does attract its fair share of tourists, but it is geared more to the boutique style visitor than to backpackers or mass tourism.

When you …

It is really telling that the 5 reviews of the Coffee Cultural Landscape so far focused fully or at least partly on the boundaries of this WHS. It reminded me of a WH travelers group T-shirt suggestion (made by Samuel ) that promoted the slogan “Are we in the core zone yet?”. Well, I will focus on the coffee production instead as the ‘tick’ should consist of having seen/experienced the OUV in addition to setting foot in a certain area.

What makes Colombian coffee farming (especially in and around the selected areas) different from others? Most farms are small scale family operations using manual labour, shade grown coffee is the traditional system and there is a strong community focus on coffee production in all aspects of life. I decided to look for these characteristics south of Salento, in an area called Palestina. Here there are a number of coffee farms that open to visitors. The biggest (which even needs pre-booking) is El Ocaso, one of the most popular among English-speaking tourists is Don Elias, but I went for the more low-key El Recuerdo . I hiked there in just over an hour from Salento on a …

It proved to be quite hard to reach Tierradentro by public transport. On my first approach I stranded at about km50 on the notorious road #26 between Popayan and Tierradentro: overnight a landslide had occurred and the road was fully blocked to any motorized transport. On foot it would have been possible, but the prospect of venturing on alone on the other side was not so tempting as the options that lay ahead seemed to be:

• being kidnapped by some last remaining FARC guerillas (this road was the only place in Colombia where I saw pro-FARC graffiti),
• being attacked by a spectacled bear (the road also sports yellow signs "be aware of bears" and "be aware of puma’s"), or,
• being assaulted by drunk men (it was New Year’s Day and we had met them consistently unsteady on their feet on the streets in every town along the route).

I succeeded a few days later after having first visited San Agustín : I took a shared taxi from San Agustin to Pitalito, a minibus from Pitalito to Garzon, another minibus from Garzon to La Plata and hopped on the back of a …

San Agustín isn’t as hard to reach as Tierradentro , but the 135km between Popayan and San Agustin still took the public bus that I was on 5 hours. About 3.5 of them were spent on an unpaved road right across Puracé National Park, which at least offered great views in return. The bus will drop you at the turn-off to San Agustín, from where it is 8km or so into town and another 3 to the Archaeological Park. This add-on was nicely taken care of by the bus company (Cootranshuila), as they paid for my ‘taxi’ into San Agustín (on the back of a motorbike).

As the site closes at 4 p.m. and it was already 1, I continued straight on to the park. At the ticket office they were kind enough to store my backpack behind the counter, so I did not have to haul it around the extensive grounds. A minor complaint though is that they have succumbed to the practice of ‘ foreigner pricing ’. I can understand it in certain circumstances, but there are a lot of middle class Colombians and …

In preparation of my Colombia trip I thought I had stumbled upon an interesting TWHS location to write about. Of the 3 Salt Towns that form a combined entry on the Tentative List, Zipaquirá is by far the most touristy one. Nemocón however is a bit more off-the-beaten track and has more authentic salt history on show. I knew from his itinerary that Solivagant aimed for Zipaquirá, so I thought I had found a different (and maybe better!) angle. Upon his return though we exchanged e-mails and it became clear that he had gone to Nemocón as well instead of Zipaquirá. To make things worse, he even wrote the kind of review which makes you wonder whether you’d want to go there at all.

I contemplated for a moment to aim for Tausa, the third town that is part of this Cultural Landscape of Salt Towns TWHS. But that would require an even longer trip by public bus from Bogota. So on an early Sunday morning I was off to Nemocón as well. There are hourly buses by the Transalianza company that will take you …

As I knew I would wake up early because of the unavoidable jet lag, I had looked for something to do in Bogotá in the early morning of my first day here. I found it with the Virgilio Barco Library , one of two TWHS in Colombia’s capital dedicated to modern architecture. It opens most days at 8 a.m. as it is a fully functioning public library. If the library were to become a WHS in the next few years, it would be the most recently built site on the List. It only opened in December 2001.

Bogotá is a sprawling city and although the library is located fairly central, I needed a 25 minute taxi ride from my hotel near the National Museum to get there. The EasyTaxi app did its work flawlessly – for less than 3 EUR I was transported from door to door by a yellow taxi. Despite the early hour, I found several people already walking the paths in the surrounding Virgilio Barco Park (which is also part of the TWHS). The area is also popular with bikers and you can rent bikes from street stalls.

The Virgilio Barco Library …

2019 has been yet another excellent year for “reviews” of visits to WHS and TWHS. During some months the queue with new reviews was so long that it could take up to 3 weeks before yours was published. It has calmed down a bit lately, so keep them flowing in!

The Statistics

The main review statistics for 2019:

• 891 new reviews have been added of both WHS and TWHS, that’s a 22% rise since 2018 and 61% compared to 2017
• 91 different people contributed (see Top 10 below)
• 14 WHS were reviewed for the first time (excluding the new, 2019, WHS of which all but 1 have also been already written about)

We do now have 7,753 reviews publicized and have covered 1094 of the 1121 WHS. These are the ones still unreviewed ...

Among the 891 new reviews, 357 are of TWHS. There certainly is a shift visible towards reviewing TWHS instead of WHS that have been covered well enough already.

Memorable reviews

It was actually Jay T who, during the meet-up in Scotland this summer, recommended the travel website of Michael Ayers to me. …

I am a fan of the Open University concept, where you can study a random subject at a high level whenever and from where it suits you. I even finished a Bachelor’s degree in Art History a few years ago at the Dutch Open University. One of the subjects in that curriculum was a disappointing introduction to Heritage management (I wrote a post about it in 2015). Last week I noticed that the UK’s Open University has a free course on my favourite subject of all: World Heritage. The course material gives an overview of what UNESCO’s World Heritage is about. Also it provides 5 case studies on specific WHS: New Lanark, Bath, Edinburgh, Lake District and Tarragona.

The course is equivalent to 10 hours of study. I clicked through it in some 45 minutes – the introductions about World Heritage, UNESCO, its procedures etc. were of course already well-known by me. I was more interested in the case studies.

New Lanark is presented as “an enormous success and [it] has gained many plaudits and awards for the long-term commitment of its trust and management …