Ten days from Bogotá to Quito: two great capitals and the white city between them

Most flights into Bogotá land in the evening or at dawn, and either way the first day should stay in the old town, which is where you will be sleeping anyway.

La Candelaria is a grid of steep, narrow streets of painted colonial houses running up towards the mountain, and it holds the presidential palace, the cathedral, the congress and most of the museums within about eight blocks. Wander it before you try to see anything in particular.

Plaza de Bolívar is the middle of that, and it is a working political square rather than a pretty one: four very different buildings from four different centuries around a stone rectangle usually full of pigeons and, often enough, a demonstration.

Finish uphill at Chorro de Quevedo, the small triangular space where Bogotá was founded in 1538. It is now surrounded by bars the size of front rooms, several of them built into a cliff of old brick, and it is the best introduction to the city's evening that exists.

The Museo del Oro is the best museum in South America and it is not a close contest. Tens of thousands of pieces of pre-Hispanic goldwork are laid out by culture across two upper floors, with the metallurgy explained properly rather than gestured at, and it ends in a darkened round room that lights up around you with a hoard laid out as an offering would have been. Two hours minimum, and it is free on Sundays, which is also when it is unbearable.

Ten minutes away, the Botero donation. Fernando Botero gave the country a hundred and twenty of his own works and eighty odd from his private collection, which is how a colonial house in Bogotá comes to hold a Picasso, a Degas, a Monet and a Bacon in the same building as several very fat sculptures. Entry is free.

In the late afternoon, go up. Monserrate stands 500 metres above the city at 3,152 metres, reached by a funicular or a cable car, with a church at the top that has been a pilgrimage site since the seventeenth century. Go up an hour before sunset, watch the lights come on across a city that goes on to the horizon, and come down before the queue builds.

The Museo Nacional occupies a building of 1823 that spent most of its life as a prison, which you can still read in the vaulted cells and the cruciform plan. The collection runs from pre-Hispanic pottery to the twentieth century, and the upper floors on the last sixty years of Colombian history are the reason to come: they are unflinching about the violence and considerably better than the country is usually given credit for.

Then a fifteen minute walk to Fragmentos, which is the most remarkable thing in the city and takes twenty minutes to see. When the FARC handed over their weapons in 2017, the artist Doris Salcedo had the guns melted down and cast into metal tiles, then invited women who had survived sexual violence during the conflict to hammer the metal flat by hand. The tiles are the floor. There is no other exhibit; you walk on it.

Give the evening to the north of the city. Around Parque 93 and the Zona Rosa is where Bogotá's restaurants are, and the good ones are very good indeed: this is one of the best eating cities in the Americas and almost none of that reputation is in the old town.

The flight down is just over an hour and the airport sits ten minutes from the middle of town, which makes this the easiest transfer day of the trip. You will be walking around Popayán by early afternoon.

The first thing to do is nothing much. The Parque Caldas is the central square, with the cathedral on one side and a statue of Francisco José de Caldas in the middle, and the streets running off it are uniformly, insistently white. Popayán has been rebuilt twice after earthquakes, most recently in 1983 when the town came down on Maundy Thursday during the Holy Week processions, and the restoration was done to the old plans rather than to new ones.

Before dinner, walk out to the Humilladero bridge, a brick viaduct of the 1870s that carried the road in from the north over the ravine, and which the town crosses on foot in the evening. The name refers to the humiliation of climbing the slope it was built to replace.

Then eat. This is the best food town on the route and the empanadas de pipián, stuffed with peanut and potato and dipped in peanut sauce, cost almost nothing.

La Ermita is the oldest church in the town, from 1546, and it is small and plain from the outside. Inside, the 1983 earthquake shook loose the plaster and revealed sixteenth century frescoes underneath that nobody knew were there, which are now the reason to go in.

San Francisco is the opposite: a large baroque church of the sixteenth century that the 1736 earthquake destroyed and which was rebuilt from 1790, with one of the largest bells in the Americas in its tower. The interior is high, white and very quiet.

In the afternoon, walk up El Morro de Tulcán. It looks like a grassy hill with a path up it and it is in fact a pre-Hispanic pyramid, built long before the Spanish arrived and used as a burial site. On the top stood an equestrian statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar, the conquistador who founded the Spanish town in 1537, until Misak activists pulled it down in 2020 in protest at what he did to the people already living here. The empty plinth, the view over all those white roofs and the argument attached to both are the best half hour in Popayán.

Eat well in the evening. Ask for tamales de pipián, carantanta, or anything the waiter recommends with a straight face.

This is the day that gets eaten by transport. There is no direct flight, so it is either a connection through Bogotá or a bus down to Cali and a flight from there, and either version puts you in Quito in the late afternoon. Quito's airport sits well out in the valley to the east and the drive in takes about an hour.

Do very little with what is left. The Plaza Grande is the centre of the old town, with the presidential palace along one side under an arcade, and the monument in the middle marks the tenth of August 1809, when Quito declared a junta and set off the whole business of South American independence rather earlier than anywhere else.

Then walk down to La Ronda as the light goes. It is a narrow cobbled street in a ravine below the colonial centre, restored in 2007 with the residents rather than around them, and it now holds craft workshops, small bars and the best canelazo in the city. It is the one place in the old town that is properly alive after dark.

You are back above 2,800 metres, having spent two days at a comfortable height. Eat lightly and leave the second beer.

Quito has the best preserved colonial centre in the Americas and this is the day it earns that. Start early: the churches open around nine and are noticeably quieter before eleven.

La Compañía is the one people come for. The Jesuits spent well over a century on it, and the interior is a single unbroken surface of carved wood under gold leaf, from the floor to the top of the dome, with Moorish geometry worked into the ceiling because the craftsmen who built it were trained in a Spain that had been Muslim within living memory of their grandfathers. Photography is not allowed inside, which is a mercy, because it means people look at it.

San Francisco, two streets away, is older and completely different in temper. It was begun in 1537, weeks after the Spanish founded the city, and it is enormous: a wide plaza, a broad flight of steps, and a monastery behind it that still functions. The Virgin of Quito on the high altar, carved with wings, is the model for the giant statue you can see on the hill from the square.

In the afternoon, the Casa del Alabado, which is a private collection of pre-Columbian art arranged by theme rather than by date, in a beautiful seventeenth century house. It is small, and it is the counterweight to a morning of Catholic gold.

The Basílica del Voto Nacional was begun in 1892, is the largest neo-Gothic church in the Americas and has never been formally finished, which is either a local superstition about the end of the world or an accounting problem, depending on who you ask. The interesting part is that you can climb it: up inside a tower, out along a walkway over the vaults of the nave, and then up a pair of steep ladders to the top of the spire. It is not for anybody who dislikes heights, and the view is the whole city and the volcano behind it. Look at the gargoyles on the way out, which are Galápagos animals: iguanas, tortoises, boobies and a pelican.

The national museum, in the modern city, holds Ecuador's archaeological collection and is the clearest account you will get of the cultures that were here before the Incas, who only arrived a few decades before the Spanish did.

In the afternoon, up the hill to Guayasamín. Oswaldo Guayasamín was Ecuador's great twentieth century painter, and his house and the Capilla del Hombre next to it were built to hold a body of work about the treatment of indigenous and poor people across the Americas. It is angry, enormous and not remotely decorative. The house also holds his pre-Columbian and colonial collections, and the view from the terrace is the best in Quito.

Twenty five kilometres north of the city, a monument stands on the line that a French expedition spent ten years measuring in the 1730s, in the survey that established the shape of the earth and gave this country its name. There is a yellow line painted on the ground, a museum in the base of the monument, and a small village of shops around it.

The joke, which the site takes in good humour, is that the line is about 240 metres out. Satellite positioning moved the equator a couple of hundred metres north of where the eighteenth century put it, and the neighbouring museum has built an entire business on standing you in the right place instead. Do both, in either order; the survey is the more impressive achievement.

Back in the city in the afternoon, take the cable car up the flank of Pichincha. It climbs from around 3,000 metres to just under 4,000 in twenty minutes, and the whole thirty kilometre length of the city lies below you with a line of volcanoes along the horizon on a clear day. Go up around four, when the cloud that sits on the mountain most mornings has usually cleared, and take a coat: it is fifteen degrees colder up there and the wind does not stop.

Do not attempt the walk on to the summit unless you have a full day, proper boots and somebody who knows the mountain.

One last climb before the airport. El Panecillo is the round hill that closes the southern end of the old town, and on top of it stands a forty odd metre aluminium Virgin with wings, assembled in the 1970s from several thousand numbered pieces and modelled on the small carved figure in San Francisco. She stands on a globe with a serpent under her feet and looks north over the whole city.

Take a taxi up and have it wait, or come with a tour. The stairs from the old town look inviting on a map and are the one bit of standard advice everybody in Quito gives you the same answer about: do not walk them.

The airport is a good forty kilometres out and the drive takes an hour, longer at rush hour. Give yourself three hours before an international flight, and change any remaining dollars in your head rather than at a counter, since you are already carrying the currency.