This spellbinding lost city in Colombia is centuries older than Machu Picchu and almost completely crowd-free
Thirty years after he scaled the wild Sierra Nevada mountains to reach Ciudad Perdida, Alex Robinson returns for a demanding three-day hike to discover if it remains a special place
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Ciudad Perdida was ‘rediscovered’ by the outside world in the 1970s (Alex Robinson)
Three decades ago, the Lost City of the Tayrona people, a Machu Picchu-sized pre-Colombian archaeological site set on a high rainforest-swathed ridge in Colombia’s wild Sierra Nevada mountains, was pioneer country. It wasn’t even on South America’s “gringo trail”. I’d heard about the walk on a trip through the Colombian Caribbean and on a whim, hiked there. It was bliss. In five days we saw no other tourists.
We slept in tin-roofed lean-tos with valleys dropping at the feet of our hammocks. I remember the firefly dusks – when millions of gleaming green living lights flickered over the trees under a dome of cold stars. We waded through rushing streams, boots hung over our shoulders, and after three days reached a stair of a thousand mossy steps that rode up a ridge to the Lost City itself. Thunder crashed as we climbed. A shaft of lightning illuminated a vast stela scored with jagged petroglyphs at the Lost City’s entrance. It was a precious epiphany; a connection with the romantic and mystical, a moment to treasure in living memory. But not to repeat. Not now that the Lost City has been found by so many backpackers.
“So why was I repeating it?”, I cursed as I trudged up a steep slope under sweltering sun. The lonely Mamey trailhead I remembered from the 1990s was now a village with tie-dye shops and lattes. Diesel-coughing Land Cruisers ferried in hikers by the dozen. Plastic bags choked the concrete gutters. There were so many walkers that we left in half-hour staggers. And the path ahead of me was still packed. This was a mistake, I thought, a double mistake: among all the fit-looking twentysomethings I was old, paunchy and out of place. And would I even make it to the Lost City this time?
As the hill finally crested, I paused to catch my breath – and forgot my regrets for a while in the magnificent view. Fields rose from the deep valley below to a tangle of jungle, which clothed the steep valley sides before merging with steamy primary rainforest. The high Sierra Nevada extended beyond, in ripples of green to distant, looming crags. The Lost City was somewhere up there; three days walk away.
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More:
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/south-america/colombia/colombia-lost-city-machu-picchu-b2488141.html
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Lost City Trek, Colombia Guide – Visiting Ciudad Perdida and the Sierra Nevada
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A guide to everything you need to know to complete the Lost City Trek in Colombia and how to get to the Ciudad Perdida archaeological site.
La Ciudad Perdida (Spanish for ‘Lost City’) is an ancient archaeological site perched within northern Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountain region, built by the Tayrona people and dating to approximately 800 AD – older than Machu Picchu.
Long forgotten, nature covered it for centuries, but with the help of archaeologists and the blessing of local indigenous people who today protect their ancestral site, around 10% of it has been uncovered and made open for those who make the pilgrimage here on the Lost City trek.
Getting there was an expedition into the world’s second-largest biodiversity system and a passage through the heartland of Colombia’s oldest indigenous communities.
One-third of the 30,000 square kilometres of the UNESCO reserved biosphere of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a National Park open for exploration, where a path has been roughly carved through the wilderness to lead you to a hidden city and the central axis of a lost civilisation.
More:
https://www.bordersofadventure.com/lost-city-trek-colombia-ciudad-perdida/
More photos of Colombia's Lost City:
http://tinyurl.com/4z39atb5
