The urban sprawl of Bogota quickly gives way to the green world on any major highway out of the city. To the northeast, the rounded shoulders of the Andes channel travelers through noisy small towns … then suddenly into the breathtaking vistas of Boyacá.
We traveled there—me and Adela, my fiancé, translator and tour guide—the day after Christmas. We badly needed time alone after a holiday season spent wrangling a big happy Colombian family through novenas and tamale dinners and shopping for presents and making preparations for Baby Jesus (not Santa) to deliver gifts.
I chattered about this and that with my beautiful companion until we reached Boyacá, one of Colombia’s 32 departments (roughly equal to states in the U.S.). The talk faded fast then, except for exclamations—Oh, look at that! Wow! Looks like pictures of the Andes in my fourth-grade geography book!—as we rolled through a landscape drenched with green after December rains.
The Andes in this part of South America, barely north of the equator, made me think of a hybrid range. A traveler sees the cragged profiles of the Rocky Mountains but without the bare rock, the limestone faces grassed over instead or planted in potatoes around little houses or shadowed by eucalyptus trees. Human settlements felt like intrusions, little strange spots on a vast verdant canvas that stretched forever into the distances.
It’s so beautiful, I told Adela.
Just wait, she answered.
We left the Troncal Central del Norte (Highway 55) just past one of the most historic sites in Colombia, Puente de Boyacá. There stands a picturesque little bridge where South American revolutionary forces led by General Simon Bolivar decisively defeated the Spanish in 1819, leading to Colombian independence. On a previous trip, we spent an hour almost alone in the park and listened, spellbound, to an old attendant describe the battle so vividly and with such emotion that tears filled his eyes. You could almost believe he personally fought the battle for the bridge that day and lost friends.
After the turn to the west, the road twisted like a gray dragon through true Colombia, an agrarian country of planters and campesinos for 400 years before the urban age bred megacities like Bogota and bustling population centers like Cartagena, Cali, Medellin and Baranquilla. Farms in the mountains remain small in scale, and just as well. Many young rural Colombians today seek opportunity and prosperity in towns with bright lights and reliable Internet connections and convenient luxuries. A man leading a burro along the roadside will have silver hair. A woman bringing wood across a field will stare out from a mask of wrinkles.
We arrived about dark in Villa de Leyva, a “touristic village,” as Adela described it. After checking in at Hotel La Posada de San Antonio, we walked a short street under Christmas lights to the town’s wide cobbled plaza. A first star showed, and Adela made a wish. The Colombians wish on their stars too.
We simply walked and discovered. Life in Colombia exists behind doorways. A simple framed entrance opened like a labyrinth to shops, restaurants with candlelit tables, grills blazing under black morcillas, blood sausages. A guitarist in an open space sang in Portuguese. Another doorway took us into an art gallery with carved wood sculptures and mixed-media works and tourist prices.
We chose from several live-music options playing their hearts out under an arcade on one side of the plaza. The musician played vallenatos, the Colombian version of country music, as universally known there as Hank Williams in the states. Adela and I danced, and so did couples from a half-dozen other tables. The servers looked at their watches desperately as 1 a.m. approached, the kitchen out of food, the staff worn out by days of holiday revelry.