Four days in Santa Marta: the oldest town in Colombia, and the shortest walk from beach to snowline

Three nights on the Caribbean: the house where Bolivar died and the Tairona gold, a full day walking the coast of Tayrona, a day of waterfalls and coffee up at Minca, and the old customs house before the plane.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Santa Marta
Places
9 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Forty two kilometres inland from this beach there is snow. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta rises straight out of the Caribbean to 5,700 metres, which makes it the highest coastal mountain range on earth, and it is why a town this small has a rainforest, a desert, a cloud forest and a coral coast within an hour of it.

Santa Marta itself was founded in 1525 and is the oldest surviving Spanish town in Colombia, though very little of that survives in the streets. It is a hot, loud, unglamorous working port that most people use as a base, which is exactly what it is good at: two of the best days out in the country start from here, and a third, the four day walk to the Lost City, starts from here too.

Three nights covers the town, the national park along the coast and the coffee hills above it. Add three or four more if the Lost City is the reason you came.

Highlights

  • Walking the coast path through Tayrona to a pair of beaches with a hut on a rock between them
  • La Piscina, the one bay in the park where the sea is calm enough to swim properly
  • Coffee at a plantation up in Minca still running on Victorian machinery and mountain water
  • The estate where Simon Bolivar died in 1830, on his way into an exile he never reached
  • Tairona goldwork in a colonial building on the seafront, with the mountains they came out of behind it

Where to stay

Santa Marta

The town sits in a bay with the mountains rising immediately behind it, so everything is close: the seafront and the small colonial centre in one direction, the airport and the resort beach south, the fishing bay north, and the national park thirty kilometres east along the coast. Minca is forty minutes up into the hills.

Three nights gives the town one afternoon, Tayrona a full day and Minca another, with the gold museum on the seafront before the flight.

Day by day

Day 1 in Santa Marta

Where Bolivar died, and the beach at the end of the street

The town does not take long, which is fine, because the two days after this one are long ones.

Simon Bolivar had liberated six countries, lost control of the union he built out of them, resigned, and was travelling to the coast to take a ship to Europe when tuberculosis stopped him at a sugar estate outside this town in December 1830. He was forty seven and nearly penniless. The estate is preserved with the room, the bed and the gardens, and it is the closest thing Colombia has to a national shrine.

Come back into town in the late afternoon, when the heat drops and the seafront fills up.

  1. 15:00

    Simon Bolivar's place of death

    Visit

    A colonial sugar estate on the edge of town where Bolivar spent his last days in December 1830, kept as it was, with the bedroom, the mill and a botanical garden of enormous trees around it. There is a museum of modern art in the grounds. An hour and a half.

  2. 17:30

    Playa de Bahia

    Visit

    The town beach, a curve of grey sand along the seafront with fishing boats at one end and the container port at the other. Not beautiful and thoroughly local: families, football, ice cream carts and a good sunset over the bay.

  3. 19:30

    Dinner in the historic centre

    Eat

    The pedestrian streets a few blocks back from the water have most of the town's restaurants, from set lunches at a plastic table to seafood on a rooftop. Order whatever came out of the bay that morning.

With more time: Buy whatever you need for Tayrona tonight: water, sunscreen, insect repellent and cash, because there are few places to buy any of it inside the park and card payment is patchy. The bars around the cathedral square are busy from about nine.

Day 2 in Santa Marta

Tayrona, on foot from the gate to the far beach

Leave early. The park gate is thirty five kilometres east and the queue to get in builds from about eight, and once you are inside the walk is two hours through forest to the good part.

From the main entrance a shuttle runs to the trailhead, and from there a path goes over boulders and through palm forest to a run of beaches, each one better than the last. Almost none of them can be swum: the surf comes in hard onto a steep shelf with a rip behind it and the warnings are not decorative. There is one sheltered bay where it is safe and the whole park knows it.

The far end is the picture everybody has seen, two crescents of sand either side of a rock with a thatched hut on top of it. It is about four hours of walking there and back plus everything in between, so plan on the whole day.

  1. 08:30

    Cañaveral

    Visit

    The road end of the park, where the shuttle from the gate drops you: a wide beach backed by palms, with the mountains behind. The sea here is unswimmable and the walk east starts from the far end of the sand.

  2. 11:00

    La Piscina

    Visit

    The one bay in this stretch of the park protected by a reef and a rock bar, which makes it calm, shallow and genuinely safe to swim in. Shade at the back, and the best hour of the day is spent here rather than pressing on immediately.

  3. 13:30

    Lunch at the campground

    Eat

    The restaurants at the beach campsites do fried fish, rice and cold drinks at prices that reflect the fact that everything arrived by mule. It is not cheap and there is no alternative, so budget for it.

  4. 14:30

    El Cabo San Juan de la Guía

    Visit

    Two curves of sand separated by a rocky headland with a thatched hut on top, and the image most people have of the Colombian Caribbean. Hammocks and tents for anyone staying, a bar, and a lot of people by mid afternoon. Swim only in the western cove where it is marked.

With more time: There is a small Tairona archaeological site an hour's climb up from the beaches, terraces and stone paths in the forest, and it is a good preview of what the Lost City looks like without the four day walk. Boats run back to the fishing village from the far beach in the afternoon, which saves the return leg and is worth knowing about if the walk out was enough.

Day 3 in Santa Marta

Up to Minca for waterfalls and coffee

Minca is a village of a few hundred people 600 metres up in the Sierra Nevada, forty minutes from the coast by jeep or motorbike taxi, and it is about ten degrees cooler than the town. People come for the birds, the coffee and the swimming holes, mostly in that order if they know what they are doing.

The coffee farm is the fixed point of the day. One of the plantations above the village has been running since the 1890s with British-installed machinery driven by water from the stream, no electricity involved, and the tour walks through the whole process from the tree to the cup.

Fit a waterfall and a viewpoint around it. The paths are steep and often muddy and the motorbike taxis will take you most of the way up any of them for very little.

  1. 09:00

    La Victoria Coffee Plantation

    Visit

    A coffee plantation above the village running on water power and Victorian machinery, entirely self-sufficient, with a tour that follows the bean from the slope to the roaster. Two hours including the tasting, and the road up is rough enough that a motorbike or a jeep is the sensible way.

  2. 12:00

    Marinka waterfall

    Visit

    A waterfall with a natural pool at the bottom, about an hour's walk up from the village or a short ride, with a couple of hammocks and a bar at the top. Busy in the middle of the day and lovely first thing or late.

  3. 13:30

    Lunch in Minca

    Eat

    The village has a handful of small restaurants doing a set lunch of soup, a main and a drink for a few thousand pesos, plus a couple of places aimed at travellers with better coffee and worse value.

  4. 15:00

    Los Pinos

    Visit

    A ridge above the village with a view over the whole Sierra on one side and out to the Caribbean on the other, which is the clearest way to understand how close the mountains are to the sea. Best in the late afternoon.

With more time: The swimming hole below the village has two small falls and a rock you can jump from, and is a twenty minute walk from the bridge. Birdwatchers should be up before six: this is one of the richest ranges in the world for endemic species, and several of them are found nowhere else at all.

Day 4 in Santa Marta

Tairona gold in the customs house, then the plane

The Tairona built the terraces and paved paths that are now grown over across this whole range, and worked gold to a standard that took the Spanish about fifteen minutes to notice. Their descendants, the Kogi and the Arhuaco, still live up there and still regard the mountain as the heart of the world.

The museum that explains them sits in the old colonial customs house facing the water, said to be among the oldest surviving buildings in the country, and it held Bolivar's body before its burial. It is small, free and well done.

The airport is twenty minutes south. If you are heading on to Cartagena instead, the buses run all day along the coast.

  1. 09:30

    Museo del Oro

    Visit

    Pre-Columbian pottery and Tairona goldwork on the seafront, with a scale model of the Lost City and a room on the indigenous communities who still live in the Sierra. Free, air conditioned, and about an hour.

With more time: With more time before the flight, the fishing bay a few minutes north of town is a good place for a last plate of fried fish looking at the boats. The pedestrian streets of the centre are at their most pleasant before nine in the morning, when the shops are opening and it is not yet thirty degrees.

Before you go

Getting in and getting around

Simon Bolivar airport is 16 km south of the centre with flights from Bogota, Medellin and a few other Colombian cities, twenty minutes into town. Buses from Cartagena take four to five hours along the coast and run all day, and door to door shuttles do the same trip faster for a little more.

The town centre is small and walkable, hot, and best in the early morning and the evening. Everything else needs transport: shared minibuses to Tayrona leave from the market, motorbike taxis and jeeps climb to Minca, and ride-hailing works in town.

Almost every visitor books the day trips through a hostel, a hotel or an agency, which is generally cheaper and less bother than assembling them from scratch. Do the transport for Tayrona in advance because the entrance queue in high season is long.

Tayrona: closures, tickets and the sea

The park closes completely for several weeks each year, usually a stretch in February, another in June and another in October, at the request of the indigenous communities who hold the land sacred. The dates move. Check them before you book anything, because people arrive to find the gates shut.

Entry is capped daily and tickets are cheaper for Colombian residents. Take a passport, buy water and snacks before you go in, and be at the entrance early: the walk is long and the middle of the day is brutal.

Most of the beaches in the park are dangerous to swim at. The Atlantic surf here comes with a strong undertow and there have been many drownings, which is why nearly all the bays are signed as prohibited. Swim only where swimming is allowed, which in practice means one sheltered bay and the sand in front of the main campground.

When to go

It is hot all year, around 31 degrees, with a sea breeze that makes the difference. The driest and busiest months are December to March. The wetter stretch runs from about May to November, heaviest in September and October, when Tayrona's paths turn to mud and the waterfalls at Minca are at their best.

Colombian holidays fill the coast: Christmas and New Year, Holy Week, and the long weekends scattered through the year. Tayrona sells out on those days.

Minca is 600 metres up and noticeably cooler, which is why people go there to sleep as well as to visit.

The Lost City walk

Ciudad Perdida is a Tairona settlement of stone terraces in the Sierra Nevada, older than Machu Picchu, reached only on foot. The walk takes four or five days, is done with one of a small number of licensed operators at a fixed price, and involves river crossings, considerable heat and about 1,200 stone steps at the end of it.

It is not a technical trek and it is a hard one, and the accommodation is hammocks and bunks in open-sided camps. Everybody starts and finishes from Santa Marta.

If that is the plan, add it on top of the three nights here rather than trying to fit it inside them.

Where to stay

The historic centre has the restaurants, the bars and the small hotels in restored houses, and it is where to be for a short stay. It is noisy and it is walkable, which is the trade.

El Rodadero, twenty minutes south, is the Colombian family beach resort: high-rise, busy, and not what most foreign visitors are here for. Taganga, the fishing bay just north, is cheaper and scruffier and has a reputation that is worse than the place.

Minca is the other option, and a good one for a night or two: cabins in the coffee hills, cool at night, birds at dawn, and forty minutes from town.

Eating and staying safe

Coastal Colombian food again: fried fish with coconut rice and plantain, arepa de huevo from a cart, ceviche, and enormous fruit juices. The set lunch, soup and a main and a drink, costs very little in the small places around the market.

The centre is lively and comfortable at night around the pedestrian streets and the seafront. Away from those, the usual precautions apply after dark. Do not walk between the town and Taganga at night, and take a car rather than the coast path.

Take insect repellent for Minca and for Tayrona, where sandflies on the beaches are the real nuisance rather than mosquitoes.

Santa Marta is not the reason to come here and it does not pretend to be. The town is functional, hot and cheerful, and it sits at the meeting point of a coral coast, a cloud forest and a snow-capped range, which is a piece of geography no other town on the Caribbean can offer.

Do Tayrona on the first full day while your legs are fresh, and go up to Minca on the second, when a cooler morning and a cup of coffee are exactly what is wanted.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

How many days do you need in Santa Marta?
Three nights: one afternoon for the town, a full day for Tayrona and a full day for Minca. If the Lost City trek is the plan, add four or five days on top and treat Santa Marta as the place you start and finish.
Is Tayrona National Park worth it?
Yes, and it is a walk rather than a beach day. Expect two hours each way through forest and over boulders, real heat, and beaches that mostly cannot be swum. The reward is a stretch of coast that looks like nowhere else in the Caribbean. Check the closure dates before you go.
When is Tayrona closed?
For several weeks each year, usually periods in February, June and October, at the request of the indigenous communities. The exact dates are announced in advance and change from year to year, so check them before booking flights or accommodation around a visit.
Can you swim in Tayrona?
Only where it is marked. Most of the bays have a violent undertow and a long record of drownings, and the prohibitions are enforced. There is one sheltered bay along the main walk where swimming is safe, and a marked cove at the far beach.
Is Minca worth a day?
Yes, and quite a few people end up staying a night. It is cooler than the coast, the coffee tour is genuinely good, there are waterfalls to swim in, and the birdwatching is world class. Forty minutes from town by jeep or motorbike taxi.
Is Santa Marta safe?
The centre and the seafront are busy and comfortable in the evening. Standard precautions apply elsewhere after dark, and the coast path towards the fishing bay to the north is not somewhere to walk at night. Take a car.