Magdalena

Santa Marta was founded in the early sixteenth century and is among the oldest continuously occupied cities on the continent, though what survives from that period is mostly street plan and a handful of buildings rather than an intact historic quarter. The centre is small, low and walkable, with a cathedral, shaded plazas, and a seafront that fills in the evening. What it is genuinely good at is being useful: the airport connects to the main Colombian cities, the transport terminal reaches everywhere along the coast, the food is excellent and cheap once you leave the tourist strip, and it is the departure point for the Sierra Nevada and the national park. Visitors who arrive expecting a resort are disappointed; visitors who treat it as a working city with good seafood and a useful bus station tend to like it.

Minca is the reason to leave the heat. It sits on the lower slopes of the range, close enough to reach in under an hour by shared jeep and high enough that the temperature drops noticeably on the way up, in a landscape of cloud forest, coffee smallholdings and cacao. The village itself is one street and a river; everything else is spread along ridges reached on foot or by motorbike taxi. What people come for is the combination of walking to waterfalls, touring small coffee and cacao farms that process on site, and birdwatching that is genuinely world-class — this flank of the range holds a remarkable number of species found nowhere else, and serious birders come specifically. Accommodation runs from hammock hostels to small lodges on ridgetops with long views down to the sea, and the standard advice is to stay at least one night rather than day-tripping, because the early morning is when the birds and the light are both at their best.

West of Santa Marta the land gives out into the Ciénaga Grande, a vast brackish lagoon system where the river meets the sea, fringed with mangrove and important enough as a wetland to carry international protection. Its most striking feature is human: several fishing villages here are built entirely over the water on wooden piles, with no land at all — houses, a school, a church and a football pitch on a platform, all reached by canoe. They are working communities rather than an attraction, and visits are made with local boatmen from the lagoon-side towns. Going with someone from the villages rather than on a passing tour is both the better experience and the version where the money stays local. Birdlife on the lagoon is prolific, and the light on the water at either end of the day is the reason photographers make the trip.

Inland and south, on the flat green plain of the banana country, Aracataca is a modest working town with one extraordinary claim: Gabriel García Márquez was born here, and the place he invented from it — Macondo — became the setting for one of the most widely read novels written in Spanish. The family house where he spent his early childhood has been restored as a museum, laid out room by room in the way the book describes, and the town has a small trade in readers coming to see the almond trees, the river and the railway that recur through his work. It is not a spectacular visit and it is not meant to be. For anyone who has read the novel it is quietly remarkable to stand in the rooms it was assembled from; for anyone who has not, it is a hot afternoon in a small town. The trip is best made from Santa Marta as a day out, and the book is best read first.