Colombia is an amazing country rich with art and culture, food, history, outdoor adventures, beautiful sandy beaches, and warm people.
I learned this when I traveled to Colombia as a guest of award-winning sustainable LGBTQ travel company, Out in Colombia, and the country’s tourism bureau, ProColombia, right before the pandemic shut down the world and tourism.
In order to travel to Colombia, travelers aged 18 and older need to provide proof of “complete vaccination” or a negative COVID-19 test 48 hours in advance of travel for an antigen test or 72 hours in advance of travel for a PCR test, according to Colombian and United States government websites.
Colombia is a year-round destination, but the best months to experience the South American country are December to March and June to September.
Colombia’s LGBTQ movement has made great strides in gaining rights since 1999, according to the Astraea Foundation’s 2021 report. The South American country’s capital, Bogota, became one of the first cities in the world to establish a government office focused on LGBTQ issues, the Sexual Diversity Department, in 2013. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2016. This year, Colombia’s constitutional court advanced gender diversity, reported Human Rights Watch.
Before my trip to Colombia, Bogota elected its first openly lesbian mayor, Claudia López Hernández, in 2020. López Hernández’s swearing-in to the office established her as the first openly LGBTQ person to lead a major South American city. Lopez Hernandez married her longtime partner just before she took office in January 2020.
Out in Colombia
It was Colombia’s beauty, people, and progress with LGBTQ rights that made gay American expatriate Sam Castañeda Holdren, 41, fall in love during his first visit in 2013. He traveled to Colombia on a three-month career break to learn to speak Spanish fluently.
“I reflected on my time back in Colombia and realized, man, I really loved it there,” Castañeda Holdren said. “There’s just a lot that makes the quality of life pretty amazing.”
In 2014, the Fresno native packed up and moved to Medellin, once the center of Colombia’s drug trafficking run by the infamous drug king, Pablo Escobar. It didn’t take long before Castañeda Holdren discovered he loved sharing what he was learning about Colombia and the country’s LGBTQ life with queer people on his blog and with friends in the states.
Gay travelers visiting Colombia found Castañeda Holdren online and asked for help for them to get to know where to go to find Colombia’s LGBTQ community. He started putting together itineraries.
In 2016, he founded Out in Colombia to continue sharing his love of the country and to promote its queer culture and businesses. Out in Colombia offers custom and packaged tours in English and Spanish.
In 2021, he set up a foundation, Cocora Alliance, where a portion of the proceeds from travelers’ trips are donated to the local communities.
It was the right time to launch his LGBTQ travel business. Colombia was only two years into its LGBTQ travel campaign to woo LGBTQ travelers to the diverse South American country.
Why Colombia?
Colombia is famous for its beauty queens, coffee, beaches, tropical jungles (35 percent of the Amazon rainforest is within the country’s borders), and its darker side with its drug lords. The country’s drug lords have been pushed deep into the Amazon on the Brazilian and Colombian border with the U.S.’s help, Sebastian Fernandez Leal, a representative with ProColombia who formerly worked at the United Nations in New York, told me in the car from Cartagena’s airport to our host hotel, Estelar Cartagena de Indias.
The South American country offers a lot to travelers. Colombia is home to more than 25 national parks. It is also the only country in South America to boast of beautiful beaches on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. World-renowned artists call Colombia home. Its coffee is famous. The country is a gastronomic hub. Its LGBTQ community is energetic with creative and culinary endeavors. The country boasts of having South America’s destination LGBTQ nightclub in Bogota.
Mega LGBTQ nightclub Theatron features 16 separate but interconnected dance clubs, including a concert hall, an all-in-one building that takes up an entire city block in Bogota.
My Journey
My journey through the country with Out in Colombia began in Cartagena and took me to Barranquilla, Medellin, and Bogota, four of Colombia’s largest cities. I was taken by the country and people. Colombia’s dark and violent past has given way to a vibrant and welcoming country with a spirited culture, warm people, and natural beauty, particularly in Cartagena, Medellin, and Bogota.
Colombia was discovered in 1499 by Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojeda. The Spanish started colonizing the area in 1525. Nearly 300 years later, a major trading hub for gold and African slaves, Colombia was founded in 1810. It remained under Spanish rule until the winning its independence in 1819.
Colombia enslaved more than one million people of African descent until the practice was abolished in 1821.
Today, Colombia is home to the third largest population of Black people outside of Africa, Brazil, and the U.S., according to Travel Noire. Colombia’s 11 million Afro-Colombians make up four Black communities: “mulattoes,” “raizales,” “palenque,” and “zambos.”
Cartagena
In Cartagena, “palenqueras,” the community’s women, stand out in the crowds with their traditional colorful dresses and head wraps balancing bowls of fruit on their heads. They can easily be found in the squares, like San Pedro Claver Square, in Cartagena’s historic walled city. Our group enjoyed tasting the “palenqueras,” traditional fruit snacks sold from one of the women’s stands. The women also pose with tourists for pictures for pay.
Cartageneras lesbian tour guide Belkin Chico of La Mesa, a tourism company that works with Out in Colombia, guided our group from Castillo San Felipe de Barajas to the walled city while telling us the city’s history. In the walled city around the memorial honoring Colombia’s beauty queens, she explained what the crowned beauties mean to Colombians.
Our evening was spent relaxing on a private sunset catamaran cruise on Cartagena Bay and enjoying a gourmet meal at the stylish Club de Pesca.
Medellin
Cartagena was dazzling and sophisticated. Medellin was gritty, bursting with creativity in the mountain city. Our group enjoyed shopping at a local market and cooking and making cocktails with gay Chef Esteban in the morning. In the afternoon, we went to the notorious neighborhood, Comuna 13, locally just C13, that was once under the control of drug lord Escobar.
Today, artists have taken over the hilltop neighborhood and transformed it. Cata Gutierrez, our tour guide, grew up during Escobar’s reign of terror in the neighborhood. A gang murdered her family in front of her eight-year-old eyes as they were taking her to school. Her uncles took her in. She started earning money rapping on the subway while going to school when she was 13 years old. She later joined Casa Kolacho, an artist collective where she found community and thrived.
Gutierrez had just launched C13 Brewing Company as a part of the Comuna Project at the time our group toured C13.
It’s challenging to be LGBTQ in the community, Gutierrez said. Homophobia remains, but two weeks before our visit a stairway was painted in rainbow colors in C13. Gutierrez said no one had defaced the steps. Instead, the community was enjoying it.
Bogota
South America’s fourth largest city, Bogota is bustling with a thriving LGBTQ community, our LGBTQ history tour guide Juan Camilo told us as we walked through the city, stopping at historical points.
Colombians were starting to embrace café life, odd as it may seem since Colombian coffee is known around the world. At Café San Alberto, our group enjoyed a coffee and rum tasting that made Irish coffee seem boring. The coffee energized us, and the rum gave us liquid courage for our salsa lessons.
On our last night in Colombia, our group enjoyed an elegant evening dining at B.O.G. Hotel and more dancing at Theatron.
Where to stay
I was a guest of Esestelar hotels in Bogota, Cartagena, and Medellin.