travel: parque nacional tayrona

Looking for an exotic destination to travel? Tayrona National Park in Colombia is the place to be.



Tayrona National Park in Colombia has always been known as one of the wildest corners of South America. Its swimming beaches are reached by a trail that dips and climbs through the forest over mounds of giant white boulders.

Who wouldn't want to swim in these beautiful waters? They are the fabled beaches of El Cabo San Juan del Guía.

Below, tourists make their way to a beach along a trail through the jungle. For years the park were a battleground between guerrilla and paramilitary groups, both of whom coveted the region as a base for cocaine processing and smuggling.

Below, a Kogui Indian boy in the park. The area is studded with archaeological sites left by Tayrona’s indigenous tribes — the Koguis and the Arhuacos — who settled the region in pre-Columbian times.

Below, a view from one of a dozen Ecohab rooms. Although these are luxury cabins, they are meant to resemble traditional Kogui dwellings.

In late 2003, the Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe, cracked down on crime. With the Sierra Nevada now largely safe, the government has set about promoting Tayrona as a tourist paradise. For $245 a night visitors today can stay in the Ecohabs resort, a complex of secluded huts built into the side of a jungled cliff overlooking the Caribbean.

Below, tourists dining in a restaurant inside the park, which is decorated with a mural depicting the Arhuaco Indians.

Below, Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino, the butterscotch yellow hacienda where Simón Bolívar, desperately ill with tuberculosis, died on Dec. 17, 1830.

Below is a picture of the inside of the hacienda — a modest adobe villa set around an ocher-tiled courtyard. It still has the canopied wooden bed where Bolívar drew his last breaths.

To read the entire article from the New York times, reviewing parque nacional tayrona as a must-go-to place, click here.