Colombia

Colombia runs from the Caribbean coast up into the Andes, and its Spanish and its music change with the altitude. The coast gave the continent cumbia and vallenato, and Barranquilla stops for four days of carnival before Lent; Bogotá, at 2,600 metres, uses usted even between friends and orders a tinto, which here is a small black coffee rather than a glass of wine.

In the coffee country of the central Andes, cherries are still picked by hand on hillside farms and carried down by old Willys jeeps; the landscape is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The customs around it are quieter than the carnival: nine nights of prayer after a death, and coffee that is never allowed to stop.

History

History of Colombia: a timeline (13 moments of its history)

Start with

  • between 600 and 1537: The Muisca and the legend of El Dorado — On the cool high plateau around today's Bogotá lived the Muisca, or Chibcha, a people of farmers, salt traders and goldsmiths who flourished from about AD 600…
  • 1585–28 January 1596: Drake raids the Spanish Caribbean — Francis Drake, 'El Draque' to the Spaniards, had robbed the mule trains at Nombre de Dios in 1572 and the silver ship Cacafuego off Peru in 1579.
  • 26 March 1713–1750: The slave asiento goes to Britain — From the sixteenth century the Crown sold the asiento, a monopoly contract to supply enslaved Africans to its American colonies, to Portuguese, Genoese, Dutch…
  • 20 July 1810: The Florero de Llorente: Bogotá's 20 July — On Friday 20 July 1810, market day in Santafé de Bogotá, a group of creoles went to the shop of the Spanish merchant José González Llorente to borrow a flower…
  • 7 August 1819: The Battle of Boyacá — In the rainy season of 1819 Bolívar led an army from the Venezuelan plains over the flooded llanos and the freezing páramo of Pisba into the heart of New…
  • October 1899–3 November 1903: The Thousand Days' War and the loss of Panama — Colombia's last and bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century began in October 1899, when Liberals rose against the Conservative government.
  • 6 December 1928: The banana massacre at Ciénaga — In November 1928 the workers of the United Fruit Company's banana plantations in Magdalena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, struck for written contracts, a…
  • c. 2015: The Venezuelan exodus — Venezuela, once the richest country in South America and a magnet for immigrants from Spain, Italy, Portugal and Colombia, has in a decade become the source of…

Culture

Culture of Colombia

Food and drink

  • Coffee: the finca and the tinto — Cherries picked by hand on a mountainside, a Willys jeep down to the village, the best beans exported and the rest drunk at home, and a cup that Colombians call a tinto.

Festivals and celebrations

  • Carnaval de Barranquilla — Four days before Lent when a port city stops working: a queen who dances for six hours, a long-nosed marimonda, death chased off by the dancers, and a puppet buried on Tuesday night by widows who laugh and cry.

Identity and society

Music and the arts

  • Cumbia and vallenato — Two rhythms from one coast: African drums and a cane flute that became the most travelled music in Latin America, and an accordion that came off a ship and learned to sing the news.

Literature and storytelling

Places and landscapes

History

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