Introduction
Boyacá is the high country north-east of the capital: cold, green, agricultural, and holding two things worth the journey. One is a small town built around a cobbled square so large it is disorienting, surrounded by dry hills full of fossils. The other is the páramo — a high Andean moorland that occurs in only a few places on earth and that quietly supplies the drinking water for a very large number of Colombians.
Overview
The department sits mostly between two and three thousand metres, which makes it cool, often misty and startlingly green — a landscape of small farms, potato fields, eucalyptus and dairy cattle that looks more like upland northern Europe than most people's idea of Colombia. Villa de Leyva is the town everyone comes for, and its central square is the thing that stops people: an enormous open expanse of rough cobbles with low whitewashed buildings on all four sides and a church at one end, unusually large for a town of this size and left deliberately unmodernised. The country around it is dry and eroded, full of marine fossils from when this was seabed, with a full plesiosaur left in the ground where it was found. Higher and further east, the moorland begins — the páramo, where the dominant plant is a thick-stemmed rosette covered in silver fur, standing in fields of thousands, which captures moisture from cloud and releases it slowly into the ground. That mechanism is why the páramo matters far beyond its own scenery. Beyond it, a high glaciated range offers serious multi-day walking, with access managed by the communities whose territory it is. And scattered across the department are craft towns that have each made one thing for generations — pottery in one, footballs in another.
Discover Boyacá
The square is the point and it is best met early, before the day visitors. It is one of the largest cobbled plazas in South America, and the surprise is not the size in figures but the effect: a space that big surrounded by low buildings and open sky reads as almost empty, and the town has resisted filling it in. The buildings around it and along the streets running off are whitewashed with heavy timber doors and courtyards behind, and the surface underfoot is rough field stone rather than tidy cobbles, which is uncomfortable to walk and entirely original. Around the town the land is dry, pale and eroded, and it is full of fossils — this was a shallow sea in the Cretaceous, and the local museums are built around what has come out of the ground, including a large marine reptile left in place where it was excavated. There is also, for reasons that make sense to nobody, an enormous house built entirely from fired clay a short way out of town.
Ways to Experience This Destination
One of South America's largest cobbled squares, deliberately left unfilled and unmodernised, in a whitewashed town best seen early before the day visitors arrive.
High treeless Andean moorland found in only a few countries, where furred rosette plants pull water from cloud and release it slowly — the water supply for millions.
A cold deep lake at three thousand metres with an improbable white-sand beach, and beyond it Colombia's best serious mountain walking, with access managed locally.
Villages that have each made one thing for generations — pottery, hand-stitched footballs, wool — worked in open-fronted workshops facing the street.
Frequently asked questions
Visaja keeps this page's contact details and visa guidance under continuous review — still, requirements can change at short notice, so confirm the essentials with the mission or the official government portal before you travel.