Bogota · Central & South America

Overview

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Santa Fé de Bogotá, as it's officially named, is a city of contrasts. Here you find modern shopping malls and open-air markets, high-rise apartments and makeshift shanties, futuristic glass towers and colonial churches. Simultaneous displays of ostentatious wealth and shocking poverty have existed here for centuries. In the neighborhood of La Candelaria, a rich assemblage of colonial mansions, were built by native peoples and financed by plundered gold.

Bogotá, a city of more than 7 million people, has grown twentyfold in the past 50 years. It suffers the growing pains typical of any major metopolis on the continent (insufficient public transportation, chronic air pollution, crime) and a few of its own (a scurrilous drug trade and occasional acts of political violence). However, recent mayors have made some progress in cleaning up parks, resurfacing roads, and implementing a new transportation system. In fact, a recent survey indicates that while a majority of Bogotanos feel that the political situation is worsening in Colombia, conditions are improving in Bogotá.

Spanish conquistadors built their South American cities in magnificent locations, and Bogotá, which stands on a high plain in the eastern Andes, is no exception. During his disastrous search for the legendary El Dorado, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, the Spanish explorer on whom Miguel de Cervantes reputedly modeled Don Quixote, was struck by the area's natural splendor and its potential for colonization. Though it's a mere 1,288 km (800 mi) from the equator, Bogotá's 8,700-ft altitude lends it a refreshing climate. Jiménez de Quesada discovered one of South America'smost advanced pre-Columbian peoples, the Muisca. But they were no match for the Spaniards. On August 6, 1538, Jiménez de Quesada christened his new conquest Santa Fé de Bogotá, on the site where the Muisca village of Bacatá once stood.

Bogotá rapidly became an important administrative center and in 1740 was made the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, an area comprising what is now Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. With its new status, grand civic and religious buildings began to spring up, often with the hand-carved ceilings and sculpted doorways that were the hallmark of New Granada architecture. But by 1900 Bogotá was still a relatively small city of 100,000. It was not until the 1940s that rapid industrialization and the consequent peasant migration to urban centers spurred Bogotá's exponential growth.