Ciudad Perdida

The Lost City of the Tayrona, known in Spanish as Ciudad Perdida, sits in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta at 1,200 metres above sea level, hidden by jungle that has reclaimed much of the surrounding landscape since the civilisation that built it collapsed around 1600 AD. The Sierra Nevada is the highest coastal mountain range in the world, rising from sea level to 5,775 metres at Pico Cristóbal Colón within 42 kilometres of the Caribbean coast, creating an extraordinary gradient of ecosystems from mangrove swamps to páramo tundra.

Reached only by a four or five-day trek through thick forest, the site consists of 169 terraces carved into the mountainside and connected by stone stairways, originally home to between 2,000 and 3,000 people belonging to the Tairona culture that predates the Inca Empire. The site was occupied from around 800 CE until the Spanish conquest forced its abandonment, and recent carbon dating of organic material found in the terraces has revised earlier estimates of its age significantly upward.

The main staircase of 1,200 steps climbs past terraces where archaeologists have found circular plazas once used for communal gatherings and ceremonial purposes, each level revealing a new perspective over the forest canopy. At the summit sits the main ceremonial plaza, a circular cleared space with stone benches arranged around a central altar where gold and pottery offerings were found in the early excavations of the 1970s.

Unlike the Inca ruins of Peru, Ciudad Perdida was not built by an empire expanding outward but by a complex society in permanent settlement that developed sophisticated agricultural terraces, aqueducts and irrigation systems independently of Andean civilisations further south. The Tairona people cultivated crops on the steep mountain slopes using terrace agriculture and are considered among the most advanced pre-Columbian cultures of northern South America.

The Tairona people who built the city were highly organised traders who maintained links with communities as far as the Amazon basin, and the goods found in recent excavations suggest trade routes that stretched across northern South America. Gold was obtained from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and worked into elaborate pectorals and nose rings using a lost-wax casting technique, many of which were found in tombs and have been returned to Colombia from international collections in recent decades.

The name Ciudad Perdida was coined in 1975 when the site was discovered by a group of treasure hunters; the local Kogi people had never lost it, referring to it as the 'heart of the world' and continuing to regard it as a sacred place. The Kogi maintain a spiritual belief that the Sierra Nevada is the mother of all mountains and have long resisted the Colombian government's efforts to develop the area for tourism, arguing that the site should not be visited by outsiders at all.

It is one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements in the Americas, older than the Inca Empire and reached only on foot through dense jungle.

The 169 terraces, stone stairways and ceremonial plazas carved by the Tairona people represent an advanced civilisation that developed independently of the Andean empires.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the world's highest coastal mountain range, creating an extraordinary ecological gradient within a single multi-day trek.