Colombia

• 1. Introduction

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  Colombia takes its name from the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus, a label first meant to describe the entire New World. Stretched across 1,141,748 square kilometers, it touches both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Around 52 million people live within its 32 departments. Its capital, Bogotá, sits at 2,600 meters, the highest city of its size in the world. This is a nation shaped by deep contradictions. Indigenous peoples occupied this corridor by 12,500 BCE, yet Spanish ships did not appear off La Guajira until 1499. It would later endure decades of armed conflict, then win a Nobel Peace Prize. How did a Spanish viceroyalty fracture into three republics? Why does one country hold the planet's densest concentration of living species? And what made its people fight, and then forgive?

• 2. Conquest And Crown

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  Alonso de Ojeda, who had once sailed with Columbus, reached the Guajira Peninsula in 1499. In 1510 Vasco Núñez de Balboa helped found Santa María la Antigua del Darién, the first stable settlement on the continent. Santa Marta followed in 1525, Cartagena in 1533. In April 1536, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada pushed inland and named the lands the New Kingdom of Granada. He founded its capital near the Muisca settlement of Muyquytá in 1538, calling it Santa Fe de Bogotá. The legend of El Dorado, the city of gold, lured the Spanish and other Europeans deeper through the 16th and 17th centuries. German conquistador Nikolaus Federmann crossed the Llanos Orientales chasing it. Indigenous populations collapsed under conquest and Eurasian diseases like smallpox, against which they had no immunity. The Spanish Crown, treating the land as deserted, sold properties to create farms and mines. Enslaved Africans were brought through the asiento system, since Spain ran no slaving factories of its own. The Viceroyalty of New Granada was established in 1717 with Bogotá at its center. In 1739 Britain targeted Cartagena, but disease crippled the British force and they withdrew, handing Spain a decisive victory.

• 3. Breaking From Spain

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  On the 20th of July 1810, patriots issued the Colombian Declaration of Independence, still celebrated as the nation's Independence Day. The movement drew inspiration from Haiti's independence of 1804, which had supported a future leader: Simón Bolívar. Ferdinand VII, restored in Spain, sent forces to retake the north under Juan de Sámano, whose punishments stoked fresh rebellion. Bolívar, born in Venezuela, proclaimed independence in 1819 and crushed pro-Spanish resistance by 1822. The war killed between 250,000 and 400,000 people, perhaps a fifth of the pre-war population. The Congress of Cúcuta adopted a constitution in 1821, with Bolívar as first President and Francisco de Paula Santander as Vice President. The union, Gran Colombia, proved unstable and dissolved in 1830, leaving Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Slavery was abolished in 1851. Bipartisan rivalry between the Liberal and Conservative parties, founded in 1848 and 1849, ignited bloody wars. The worst, the Thousand Days' War of 1899-1902, cost between 100,000 and 180,000 lives. Then in 1903, with US and French backing, Panama seceded, fixing Colombia's modern borders.

• 4. A Century Of Violence

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  On the 9th of April 1948, the assassination of Liberal candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán triggered riots in Bogotá known as El Bogotazo. The bloodshed spread nationwide and claimed at least 180,000 lives in a period called La Violencia. Colombia later joined the Korean War under President Laureano Gómez, the only Latin American country to fight directly as a US ally, notably at Old Baldy. To end the killing, the Conservative and Liberal parties formed the National Front, alternating the presidency every four years for sixteen years. Yet guerrilla groups still emerged, including the FARC, the ELN, and the M-19. Since the 1960s the country endured an asymmetric conflict among government forces, leftist guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries. The United States encouraged early attacks on rural militias as part of its fight against communism. From the mid-1970s, drug cartels turned Colombia into a major producer of marijuana and cocaine. A new Constitution was promulgated on the 4th of July 1991. President Juan Manuel Santos signed a revised peace deal with the FARC-EP in November 2016, and won the Nobel Peace Prize that year. In 2022 Gustavo Petro became the country's first leftist president, alongside Francia Márquez, the first Black vice president.

• 5. The Living Land

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  About 10% of all species on Earth live in Colombia, one of seventeen megadiverse nations. It holds the planet's highest biodiversity per square mile and ranks first in bird species, with over 1,900, more than Europe and North America combined. The country claims 14% of the world's amphibian species and between 40,000 and 45,000 plant species. It leads the world in orchids and in endemic butterflies, and shelters roughly 7,000 species of beetles. Six natural regions define its terrain: the Andes, the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, the Llanos, the Amazon, and the islands. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta rises to Colombia's tallest peaks, Pico Cristóbal Colón and Pico Simón Bolívar. The Andes split into three cordilleras, with Central peaks reaching 5,000 meters. Sitting on the Ring of Fire, the country faces earthquakes and eruptions. The eastern lowlands cover more than half its area but hold under 6% of the people. Protected areas span 12.77% of national territory.

• 6. People And Prosperity

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  Spanish is spoken by about 99.2% of Colombians, alongside 65 Amerindian languages, two Creoles, Romani, and Colombian Sign Language. English holds official status in the San Andrés archipelago. Genetic studies find Colombians average 47% Amerindian, 42% European, and 11% African ancestry. The country recovered its pre-conquest population only in the 1940s, nearly 450 years after the 16th-century peak. Today it is among the most urbanized in Latin America, with 77.1% in cities and Bogotá home to over 7.3 million. It also carries one of the world's largest internally displaced populations, up to 4.9 million. Roughly 90% of people follow Christianity, the majority Roman Catholic. Colombia's diversified economy is the third-largest in South America, with a 2023 GDP measured at one trillion dollars by purchasing power. It is among the five largest global producers of coffee, avocado, and palm oil, the world's largest emerald producer, and the second-largest flower exporter after the Netherlands. The World Health Organization ranked its healthcare best in the Americas. Among Colombian inventions stands the first external artificial pacemaker with internal electrodes, devised by engineer Jorge Reynolds Pombo, a lifeline for those in heart failure.