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.

Above roughly three thousand metres the trees stop and the páramo begins: wet, cold, treeless Andean moorland that exists in only a few countries and reaches its greatest extent here. The plant that defines it is a tall rosette of thick silver-furred leaves on a woody stem, growing in stands of thousands across the hillsides, and its function is the interesting part. The fur traps moisture directly out of the near-permanent cloud, the soil beneath is deep, spongy and acidic, and the whole system works as a slow-release reservoir — absorbing water constantly and letting it out gradually into the streams that supply Colombia's Andean cities. This is a landscape that is literally the water infrastructure for millions of people. Walking in it is strange and quiet: cold, wet underfoot, with visibility that closes and opens, and thousands of these plants standing like a crowd. Go with a guide, dress for cold rain regardless of the forecast, and stay on paths, because the soil is easily damaged and recovers over decades rather than seasons.

East of the moorland lies a large lake at around three thousand metres, which is a genuine oddity — cold, deep, ringed by onion fields, and with a stretch of white sand beach on one shore that produces the disconcerting sight of a tropical-looking beach at an altitude where the wind cuts. People swim; it is extremely cold. Beyond it, the department reaches the high glaciated range that is Colombia's best serious mountain walking, with multi-day routes among peaks and lakes. Access to that range is managed by the indigenous communities whose territory it crosses and has been restricted at times, so it is essential to check the current position well before planning a trek rather than arriving and hoping. The wider question of how altitude shapes a Colombian itinerary is covered on the itinerary guide — this department is the top of that ladder.

Boyacá's craft villages are a genuine feature rather than a marketing idea, and each has specialised for generations. One town produces pottery almost exclusively — terracotta, rough-glazed, in workshops that run the length of the main street and sell directly. Another makes footballs, hand-stitched, supplying a large share of the country's supply from a single small settlement in a green valley. A third works in wool. The pleasure of visiting them is watching the work rather than shopping: these are production towns where the craft happens in open-fronted workshops facing the street, and the makers are generally happy to be watched. They sit close enough together to be combined into one unhurried day from Villa de Leyva, and the roads between them run through some of the most attractive farmland in the country.