This week’s dream: Colombia’s birdwatching paradise
With more avian species than anywhere else in the world, Colombia is “ornithological heaven”, and no region will delight birdwatchers more than its unspoilt Caribbean coast, says Emma Duncan in 1843 magazine. The region was long isolated by the country’s civil war – from which it finally emerged in 2016, when the government signed a peace deal with the left-wing Farc guerrillas. Now it feels quite safe and very welcoming, though there are still army checkpoints on the roads and few tourists outside the cities. That’s fine if you’re a nature lover, of course. The appeal of birdwatching is a mystery to many, but it lies partly in the peace and focus it demands, a kind of “enforced meditation” in beautiful places.
Rising steeply from the coast some four hours’ drive east of Cartagena, the Santa Marta mountains are “a special sort of avian paradise”, teeming with rare species. Stay if you can at Casa Galavanta, a private house built of wood with a glass facade giving fine views across the cloud forest to the sea. Its garden is “fabulous”, its chef superb. And with a guide such as Nick Bayly (a Briton who runs a conservation NGO in Bogotá), you shouldn’t have to go far to spot the area’s most “gorgeous” birds, including the crimson-backed tanager, the crested oropendola and, most “glamorous” of all, the keel-billed toucan, with its lime-green, red and orange beak.
Take a boat down the Don Diego River to where it meets the sea – an “astonishingly beautiful” place, home to “sharp-eyed kingfishers, sunbathing vultures and every imaginable sort of heron”. Cartagena itself, with its wildly colourful old town, is of course worth a visit. And for a “final avian outing”, head out to the nearby mangrove swamp of La Boquilla, where you might spot 40 or more species in an afternoon, from ibises to roseate spoonbills and more. Miraviva (020-7186 1111, www.miravivatravel.com) has a nine-day trip from £2,891pp, excluding international flights.