Introduction
From the Amazon rainforest to Bogotá’s streets, these films reveal the landscapes, cultures, music, and history that most travelers never get to know.
Many travelers watch Narcos before coming to Colombia. After years working as a historian and local host, I’ve noticed how often the series sparks curiosity about the country especially about Pablo Escobar, Medellín, and Colombia’s recent history.
I understand why.
I watched Narcos too, and I believe it tells an important chapter of Colombia’s past. It helps explain how drug trafficking shaped the country during the 1980s and 1990s and why Pablo Escobar became one of the most infamous criminals in modern history. Understanding that period matters because history helps explain the present.
The legacy of those years did not disappear overnight.
As you travel through Colombia, you’ll occasionally encounter the social scars left by decades of violence, inequality, and armed conflict. In parts of Medellín, Cartagena, Santa Marta, and many other places, those historical processes are still visible today. They are not something Colombians are proud of, nor something we try to erase. They are part of who we are, and understanding them is part of understanding the country.
As a historian and local host, I often receive questions inspired by Narcos. Sometimes travelers ask whether Pablo Escobar is admired in Colombia. Others want to visit places connected to him. And quite often, standing in Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, someone points to the Palace of Justice because they recognize it from the series.
Those conversations usually become much more interesting than the television show itself.
We talk about the armed conflict, political violence, and the historical events that shaped modern Colombia. We also talk about something equally important: how a society moves forward after decades of conflict. History is rarely as simple as a television series, and Colombia’s story certainly isn’t.
The problem begins when travelers assume that Narcos tells the whole story.
It doesn’t.
Even during the darkest years of violence, Colombia was never a country defined by a single reality. While criminal organizations dominated international headlines, millions of Colombians were simply living their lives: raising families, going to school, creating music, celebrating festivals, building businesses, and traveling across the country. Indigenous communities continued protecting the Amazon. Humpback whales returned every year to the Pacific Coast. Coffee growers cultivated the Andes. Caribbean musicians transformed a German-made accordion into one of Colombia’s most distinctive musical traditions.
These are understandable questions, but they also reveal how powerful a single story can become.
The Colombia you’ll discover is far more diverse than the version shown on television. It’s a country of snow-capped mountains, cloud forests, tropical dry forests, páramos, deserts, rainforests, two oceans, hundreds of regional traditions, and dozens of distinct accents. Every region tells a different story, and no single film or TV series can capture them all.
That’s why I don’t recommend replacing Narcos.
I recommend complementing it.
The films and documentaries in this guide won’t simply entertain you. They’ll help you understand the places you’ll visit, the people you’ll meet, and the stories hidden behind Colombia’s landscapes.
And here’s the best part: there isn’t a wrong time to watch them.
Watch them before your trip, and you’ll arrive with cultural context. Watch them while traveling, and the films become a parallel journey, helping you recognize places, traditions, and conversations that suddenly make much more sense. Watch them after you return home, and they’ll reveal connections you may have missed while you were here, allowing you to relive your journey through new eyes.
Travel changes the way we watch these stories.
And these stories, in turn, change the way we experience Colombia.
Colombia as Nature
Colombia Magia Salvaje (Colombia Wild Magic)
Perfect if you’re traveling to: the Coffee Region, Chingaza National Park, Caño Cristales, Los Llanos, the Pacific Coast, the Amazon, or any nature-focused destination in Colombia.
If I could recommend just one film to someone visiting Colombia for the first time, this would be it.
One of the things I love most about Colombia Magia Salvaje is that it strikes a balance between the extraordinary and the accessible.
Some of its most breathtaking scenes were filmed in places that are incredibly remote and difficult to reach locations that few people, even Colombians, will ever have the opportunity to visit. Others, however, are surprisingly accessible with good planning. National parks, cloud forests, the Coffee Region, parts of the Amazon, the Pacific Coast, and many of the landscapes featured in the documentary can become part of a real itinerary.
The documentary also reminds you of something every traveler quickly discovers in Colombia: you won’t be able to see everything in a single trip. Colombia’s geography is simply too diverse. In just a few hours, you can travel from snow-capped mountains to tropical rainforest, from high-altitude páramos to Caribbean beaches, or from the Pacific coast to the eastern plains. Every region feels like a different world.
That’s why planning a trip through Colombia is often less about how many days you have and more about choosing which stories you want to experience. In fact, I wrote a separate guide on how to travel around Colombia because understanding the country’s geography is one of the biggest challenges and one of the greatest joys of visiting it.
Perhaps that’s the documentary’s greatest achievement. Rather than making you feel you’ve already seen Colombia, it leaves you wanting to discover more. I’ve found myself returning to it more than once, not only to admire its cinematography but also to find inspiration for places I still hope to visit and for destinations I’ve been lucky enough to experience before.
Watch this before: any nature-focused itinerary. You won’t just recognize Colombia’s landscapes you’ll understand why each one deserves a journey of its own.
Colombia as Ancestral Knowledge
Embrace of the Serpent (El Abrazo de la Serpiente)
Perfect if you’re traveling to: the Colombian Amazon.
If your itinerary includes the Amazon, this is one of the most meaningful films you can watch before your trip.
For many travelers, the Amazon is simply a vast green area on the map often described as “the lungs of the planet.” While that phrase captures something important about its environmental significance, it barely scratches the surface of what this region really represents.
Embrace of the Serpent invites you to see the Amazon differently.
Rather than focusing on wildlife or adventure, the film explores the forest through the eyes of Indigenous peoples who have lived in this forest for thousands of years. The Amazon is no longer just a landscape; it becomes a place of memory, spirituality, knowledge, and a different way of understanding humanity’s relationship with nature.
The film also reminds us that the Amazon has never been as isolated as many people imagine. Explorers, missionaries, rubber traders, scientists, and Indigenous communities have met here for centuries. Sometimes those encounters led to exchange and collaboration; at other times, they brought exploitation and violence. All of them became part of the region’s history.
The Amazon isn’t a world frozen in time. It’s a place where different cultures, peoples, and worldviews have constantly interacted.
One of the reasons I recommend watching this film before visiting the Amazon is that it prepares you to think differently about the conversations you may have with Indigenous guides and local communities. During your trip, you’ll begin to understand that rivers, plants, animals, and landscapes can be interpreted not only through science, but also through stories, traditions, and knowledge passed down across generations.
At the same time, it’s important not to expect the Amazon portrayed in the film to look exactly like the one you’ll visit today.
Many travelers arrive expecting to find Indigenous communities living exactly as they did centuries ago. They may imagine everyone wearing traditional clothing, living in complete isolation, and untouched by the modern world.
That’s simply not today’s reality.
The Colombian Amazon is a living, evolving region. Indigenous communities use smartphones, children attend school, boats have outboard motors, and many families combine ancestral traditions with contemporary life. Culture isn’t frozen in time, and expecting it to remain unchanged can create unrealistic expectations about the people you’ll meet.
What Embrace of the Serpent captures so beautifully isn’t a documentary portrait of today’s Amazon. It captures something deeper: the wisdom, spirituality, and cultural perspectives that have shaped and continue to shape the relationship between people and the forest.
If you’re fortunate enough to spend time with Indigenous guides during your visit, you’ll notice that many of these perspectives are still present not as relics of the past, but as living ways of understanding the forest.
By the time you arrive, you’ll realize that the greatest richness of the Amazon isn’t only its biodiversity.
It’s also the people who have called this forest home for thousands of years and continue to give meaning to one of the most extraordinary places on Earth.
Watch this before: traveling to Leticia or exploring the Colombian Amazon. You’ll understand that you’re not simply entering a rainforest you’re entering one of the world’s richest cultural and ecological landscapes.
Colombia as Cultural Transformation
Birds of Passage (Pájaros de Verano)
Perfect if you’re traveling to: La Guajira, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Palomino, Riohacha, Cabo de la Vela, or the Colombian Caribbean.
At first glance, you might think Birds of Passage is another film about drug trafficking.
It isn’t.
The film takes us back to the Bonanza Marimbera of the 1970s, before Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel came to dominate the international drug trade. Instead of focusing primarily on crime itself, the story explores something far more interesting: what happens when enormous wealth suddenly enters a traditional society.
Set in La Guajira, Birds of Passage follows a Wayuu family whose lives are gradually transformed by the marijuana trade. The real conflict isn’t simply between police and criminals. It’s between tradition and ambition, between ancestral values and the temptations of money, and between a community’s established way of life and forces it cannot fully control.
That’s what makes the film so powerful.
If you’re planning to visit Colombia’s Caribbean region especially La Guajira this film offers a remarkable introduction to a part of the country that many travelers never fully understand. You’ll discover that this landscape is far more than endless beaches and dramatic deserts. It is home to the Wayuu people, whose family networks, clan relationships, oral traditions, and cultural identity continue to shape life across the peninsula.
The film also reveals something that applies far beyond La Guajira: every Colombian region has its own history.
The Caribbean experienced the arrival of the drug trade differently from Medellín, Bogotá, or the Amazon. Political events, economic changes, migration, geography, and local traditions shaped each region in distinct ways. Understanding these differences helps explain why Colombians often speak about their country not as a single reality, but as many different Colombias living side by side.
Like any historical drama, Birds of Passage isn’t a documentary, and it shouldn’t be understood as a complete portrait of Wayuu culture. Instead, think of it as a powerful story inspired by real historical processes. Its value lies in the tensions it reveals: how economic opportunity can reshape relationships, how traditional structures come under pressure, and how a community can be transformed by forces arriving from beyond its borders.
That distinction is important when watching the film.
The Wayuu culture you encounter today is not simply the culture portrayed on screen, just as contemporary La Guajira cannot be reduced to the events of the 1970s. The region has continued to evolve, while many of its traditions and identities remain deeply rooted.
One of the reasons this film resonates with me is that I understood it differently after visiting La Guajira myself.
Growing up in Bogotá, Indigenous Colombia often felt culturally distant, despite being part of the same country. It wasn’t until I traveled through La Guajira that many of the relationships portrayed in the film the connection between territory, family, tradition, and landscape began to make much more sense. The film didn’t explain La Guajira to me; it helped me understand what I had experienced there.
Few films capture the geography of a place as faithfully as Birds of Passage. The lush green slopes of the Sierra Nevada are the same ones you’ll see around Minca and Palomino. The vast desert is the same one you cross on the way to Cabo de la Vela, Bahía Honda, or the spectacular Taroa Dunes in Punta Gallinas the northernmost point of South America.
Of course, no film can replace standing there in person. But Birds of Passage does something equally valuable: it helps you understand the landscape before you arrive, and appreciate it more deeply once you’re there.
After visiting La Guajira, you’ll probably remember the film differently. The vast desert, the powerful Caribbean winds, the silence of the landscape, and the strength of Wayuu identity will no longer feel like cinematic scenery they’ll remind you of real places and real people.
Watch this before: traveling to La Guajira or exploring Colombia’s Caribbean region. It will help you understand that every landscape also carries its own history and that Colombia’s regions have not all experienced the country’s history in the same way.
Colombia as Music and Oral Tradition
The Wind Journeys (Los Viajes del Viento)
Perfect if you’re traveling to: Valledupar, La Guajira, the Caribbean coast, or if you want to understand Colombian music and rural traditions.
Some countries are best understood through their monuments.
Others are better understood through their music.
Colombia belongs to the second group.
The Wind Journeys is one of the best films to watch if you want to understand the cultural landscape of the Colombian Caribbean. The film follows a traveling musician on a journey through northern Colombia as he carries his accordion across towns, villages, and rural landscapes.
But this is not only a story about music.
It is a story about memory, traditions, and the people who keep stories alive.
The film offers a beautiful introduction to vallenato, one of Colombia’s most important musical traditions. And there is something wonderfully Colombian about the instrument at the heart of it.
The accordion was not invented in Colombia. It was developed in Europe, and instruments made by the German company Hohner eventually found their way into the Colombian Caribbean.
The people who built those accordions could hardly have imagined what Colombians would do with them.
In Colombia, the accordion became something completely different. Musicians made it their own, combining it with local rhythms, voices, and storytelling traditions until it became one of the defining sounds of the Caribbean region.
Vallenato was never only about music. Traditionally, it was also a way of sharing news, telling stories, remembering people, and describing everyday life. Musicians traveled from town to town carrying stories through their songs, turning music into a form of communication across a vast rural landscape.
This is why vallenato can be understood as a form of oral history.
The songs tell stories about love, friendship, conflicts, journeys, landscapes, and ordinary people. They preserve memories that might otherwise disappear.
One scene has stayed with me ever since I first watched the film. As the protagonist crosses valleys, mountain trails, and remote landscapes with his accordion, I can’t help thinking about the many hikes I’ve done with travelers across Colombia. The destination almost becomes secondary. What stays with you is the journey itself.
Although the landscapes in the film belong to Colombia’s Caribbean region, that feeling is universal. I’ve experienced it walking through the Chicamocha Canyon, crossing Andean trails, and exploring remote corners of the country. After a few hours on foot, conversations become quieter, the pace slows down, and people naturally become more reflective. You begin to notice the sound of birds, insects, the wind moving through the trees, and the silence that so often disappears from everyday life.
That’s one of the reasons I love introducing travelers to Colombian music during long drives between destinations. Every region has its own soundtrack. In the Caribbean, it’s vallenato. On the Pacific Coast, African influences shape marimba music and powerful percussion. In the Llanos, the harp, cuatro, and maracas define the rhythm of everyday life. Just as Colombians transformed the accordion into something uniquely their own, they have continually adapted instruments and musical traditions from different parts of the world into sounds that today feel unmistakably Colombian.
The Wind Journeys is also a reminder that Colombia’s Caribbean region is much more than beaches and colonial cities. Behind the popular image of Cartagena lies another Caribbean: one of small towns, cattle ranches, musicians, farmers, and communities where traditions continue to shape daily life.
Watching this film before traveling through the region changes the way you listen. A vallenato song is no longer just background music it becomes a story connected to a place, a landscape, and a way of understanding the world.
Watch this before: visiting Valledupar, La Guajira, or exploring the rural Caribbean. It will help you understand that in Colombia, music is not only entertainment it is a way of remembering.
🎧 Listen before you travel
- La Gota Fría Emiliano Zuleta / Carlos Vives
- La Casa en el Aire Rafael Escalona
- El Testamento Rafael Escalona
Colombia as a City Where Many Colombians Meet
The Strategy of the Snail (La Estrategia del Caracol)
Perfect if you’re traveling to: Bogotá, especially La Candelaria and the historic center.
If you’re planning to explore Bogotá’s historic district of La Candelaria, The Strategy of the Snail is one of the best films you can watch before your visit.
At first glance, it’s the story of a group of neighbors trying to avoid eviction from an old house.
But beneath that simple premise lies a much deeper reflection on Bogotá, migration, inequality, and the meaning of home.
One of the most fascinating things about Bogotá is that almost every region of Colombia is represented here. For generations, people have arrived in the capital in search of education, work, safety, and new opportunities. Bogotá isn’t simply a city of people born there it’s a city built by Colombians from every corner of the country.
The characters in The Strategy of the Snail reflect this reality. They come from different backgrounds and circumstances, yet they all share the same city. In many ways, Bogotá itself becomes the film’s main character.
The story also captures a city in transition. Following El Bogotazo in 1948, Bogotá expanded rapidly. As the city grew northward, many families left the traditional center, while neighborhoods such as La Candelaria became increasingly diverse, welcoming people from different regions and social backgrounds.
That contrast between the old city and the modern one quietly runs throughout the film. In the early 1990s, Bogotá was already changing and today that transformation is even more evident.
One of my favorite places to explain that evolution is from the top of Monserrate. From there, you can almost read Bogotá’s history in its skyline: the colonial center founded by the Spanish, the self-built neighborhoods spreading across the southern hillsides, the Bauhaus-inspired campus of the National University, the Brutalist towers that reshaped the city during the second half of the twentieth century, and the contemporary districts stretching north toward Chapinero, El Chicó, and Usaquén.
Many travelers tell me they’re surprised by how modern Bogotá feels. Before arriving, they often imagine a city defined only by its colonial center or by old headlines about Colombia. Instead, they discover a dynamic capital where centuries of history coexist with contemporary architecture, an outstanding museum scene including the Gold Museum, the Botero Museum, Fragmentos, and the Santa Clara Museum and one of the country’s most exciting culinary scenes, with restaurants such as Salvo Patria, Afluente, and Nueve.
History isn’t something locked away in museums or old buildings. In Bogotá, it’s written into the city’s landscape, and understanding that landscape helps explain the city you experience today.
Perhaps that’s the best way to understand Bogotá: not as a city with a single identity, but as a place where history and modernity, tradition and innovation, and millions of Colombian stories come together.
It’s also why I often tell travelers that Bogotá deserves far more than a single night at the beginning or end of a trip. The capital isn’t simply the gateway to the rest of Colombia it’s one of the best places to begin understanding the country itself. In fact, I wrote an entire guide about why Bogotá deserves more time than most itineraries allow, because the more you explore it, the more layers you uncover.
You’ll enjoy this film even more if, after watching it, you spend a morning wandering through La Candelaria and an afternoon looking back at the city from Monserrate. Only then do you realize that Bogotá isn’t one city it is many cities layered on top of one another.
Colombia as Territory and Belonging
The Kings of the World (Los Reyes del Mundo)
Perfect if you’re traveling to: Medellín, Antioquia, or if you want to understand Colombia beyond the images most visitors see.
Many travelers arrive in Medellín with two very different images in mind.
One comes from Narcos: violence, drug trafficking, and the city of the 1980s and 1990s.
The other comes from tourism: colorful neighborhoods, street art, music, innovation, and stories of transformation.
Both are real.
But neither tells the whole story.
The Kings of the World explores the space between those two realities.
The film follows a group of young men from Medellín after one of them learns he may recover a piece of land that once belonged to his family. What begins as a road trip gradually becomes something much deeper: a search for identity, dignity, justice, and belonging.
As you travel through Colombia and through much of Latin America you’ll inevitably encounter realities that don’t always appear in travel brochures. You may meet people asking for money at traffic lights, pass through vulnerable neighborhoods, or hear stories of families who left the countryside decades ago.
For many visitors, those scenes simply become part of the landscape.
But they didn’t appear overnight.
Like Colombia’s forests, cities, and traditions, these realities also have a history.
The Kings of the World invites you to look beyond what you see and ask a more important question:
How did we get here?
The film doesn’t offer easy answers, because there aren’t any. Instead, it quietly explores some of the long processes that continue to shape Colombia today: the armed conflict, forced displacement, unequal access to opportunities, illegal economies, and the difficult choices many young people have faced for generations.
Understanding this history doesn’t mean reducing Colombia to its problems. Quite the opposite. It helps explain why resilience, community, and transformation have become such important parts of the country’s identity.
One of the things I enjoy most as a guide is when travelers ask questions that many people might consider uncomfortable or even controversial. Conversations about politics, inequality, the armed conflict, or drug trafficking are not always easy, but they are often the ones that lead to the deepest understanding.
We don’t have to ignore reality in order to appreciate a place. In fact, understanding its challenges often helps us appreciate its achievements even more.
One of the clearest examples is Medellín itself. Neighborhoods such as Comuna 13, once associated almost exclusively with violence, are now among the city’s most visited places. Today, many local families earn a living through tourism by sharing their stories, creating art, guiding visitors, and showing a different side of their community. Tourism hasn’t solved every challenge, but it has become one of the ways many neighborhoods have reclaimed their future.
There’s another reason I recommend this film. It was directed by Laura Mora, one of Colombia’s most acclaimed contemporary filmmakers. In an industry where female directors remain underrepresented, her work stands out not only for its extraordinary visual language but also for the empathy with which she portrays people whose stories are often overlooked.
After watching The Kings of the World, Medellín looks different. A neighborhood is no longer just a viewpoint, a mural, or a photo opportunity. It becomes a place filled with memories, aspirations, and people whose lives have been shaped by a history that is still unfolding.
Watch this before: visiting Medellín or taking a community-based or history-focused tour. It will help you understand that behind every transformed neighborhood are stories far more complex than any headline or any postcard can tell.
Don’t be afraid to ask difficult questions while you travel. Some of the most meaningful conversations begin there.
Colombia as Memory and Imagination
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad)
Perfect if you’re traveling to: anywhere in Colombia, especially the Caribbean region, Villa de Leyva, Mompox, Barichara, and the country’s traditional towns.
Some countries are recognized through their monuments.
Others through their food.
Colombia has also been introduced to the world through a story.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, the masterpiece by Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, is one of the most influential works ever written about Colombia. For many travelers, it is also one of the most fascinating ways to begin understanding the country’s imagination, history, and cultural identity.
If the original novel feels challenging at first, the television adaptation offers an accessible introduction to the world of Macondo and the Buendía family.
But One Hundred Years of Solitude is not simply a fantasy story.
Behind its magical elements are very real Colombian experiences: small-town life, political conflicts, the arrival of modernity, family traditions, foreign influence, social inequality, and the constant dialogue between memory and forgetting.
Macondo is fictional, but it feels familiar because it reflects a world that many Colombians still recognize.
In fact, I sometimes think that traveling through Colombia helps you understand García Márquez better than García Márquez helps you understand Colombia.
Walk through the cobbled streets of Villa de Leyva, cross the quiet plazas of Mompox, wander through Barichara, or spend time in almost any traditional Colombian town, and you’ll begin to notice it. The architecture, the conversations unfolding in the main square, the neighbors who know one another, the unhurried rhythm of daily life, the stories passed from one generation to the next. These are the kinds of ordinary moments that inspired García Márquez’s extraordinary imagination.
You won’t find Macondo on a map.
But from time to time, you’ll feel as though you’ve stepped into it.
One of my favorite examples is the Night of the Little Candles (Noche de las Velitas) on December 7. Across the country, families place candles and lanterns outside their homes, neighbors gather in the streets, children run between the lights, music fills the air, and conversations continue late into the evening. Depending on where you are, people share aguardiente or rum, traditional food, and stories with friends, relatives, and sometimes complete strangers.
For Colombians, it’s simply part of life.
For many visitors, it feels like magical realism unfolding in front of their eyes.
Moments like these remind us that García Márquez didn’t invent magic out of nowhere. He transformed everyday Colombian life into literature.
That’s why I often think travelers don’t come to Colombia looking for magical realism.
They leave having experienced a little of it.
Sometimes it’s during a festival.
Sometimes it’s while listening to an elderly resident tell stories in a village square.
Sometimes it’s an unexpected conversation on a bus, a sudden tropical downpour that brings an entire street together under one roof, or a family inviting you to join their table.
The longer you stay, the easier it becomes to recognize those moments.
After watching One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombia becomes less about checking destinations off a list and more about recognizing the memories, characters, traditions, and stories that give each place its own personality.
Watch this before, during, or after your trip. Before, it introduces you to Colombia’s imagination. During, you’ll begin recognizing pieces of Macondo in unexpected places. Afterward, you’ll realize that some of your favorite memories already belonged there.
Colombia Is Not One Story
Colombia Is Not One Story
After watching these films, one thing becomes clear: Colombia cannot be explained through a single image.
It is not only the country portrayed in Narcos. It is not only the Amazon rainforest, the Caribbean beaches, the coffee mountains, or the colorful streets that appear in travel photos.
Colombia is all of these things at the same time.
It is a country where Indigenous knowledge has survived for generations, where African and European influences helped create some of Latin America’s most distinctive musical traditions, where cities have been transformed through resilience and creativity, and where landscapes carry the memories of generations of people who have lived, migrated, struggled, and dreamed here.
The best journeys are not only about seeing places.
They are about understanding them.
And there is no single right moment to watch these films.
Watch them before your trip, and they will give you context. You’ll arrive knowing a little more about the landscapes, people, history, and traditions you’re about to encounter.
Watch them during your trip, and something different happens. The film becomes a kind of parallel journey. As you move through Colombia during the day, you’ll begin seeing places, hearing music, and meeting people with the story still somewhere in the back of your mind. What you discover in real life starts to interact with what you saw on screen.
And watch them after you return home, and the experience changes again. A place you barely noticed at the time may suddenly make sense. A song you heard in a restaurant may remind you of a region you visited. A landscape may bring back a conversation with a guide. References that passed unnoticed during your trip can suddenly become clear.
That is one of the beautiful things about travel: sometimes you don’t understand a place completely while you’re there.
Sometimes you need to leave before you can see what you experienced.
A film cannot replace standing in front of the Amazon River, listening to vallenato in the Caribbean, walking through Bogotá’s historic streets, sharing a conversation with a local host, or watching the sunset over the Pacific coast.
But the right story can change the way you experience those moments.
You begin to recognize details that you might otherwise miss. A song becomes connected to a region. A landscape becomes connected to history. A neighborhood becomes connected to the people who built it.
And that is ultimately what thoughtful travel is about.
Not simply collecting destinations, but understanding the stories behind them.
At Circling Colombia, this is how we believe Colombia should be experienced: not as a checklist of famous places, but as a country of landscapes, cultures, histories, and human stories that reveal themselves slowly as you travel.
You don’t need to know all of these stories before you arrive.
You simply need to arrive curious.
Because Colombia is not one story.
There are many Colombias, living together.
| Film / Series | Best for |
|---|---|
| Colombia Magia Salvaje | Nature & multi-region trips |
| Embrace of the Serpent | The Amazon |
| Birds of Passage | La Guajira & the Caribbean |
| The Wind Journeys | Valledupar & the rural Caribbean |
| The Strategy of the Snail | Bogotá |
| The Kings of the World | Medellín & rural Colombia |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | The Caribbean & traditional towns |
Tomás Vargas
Historian | Colombia Travel Specialist & Host | Co-Founder of Circling Colombia
Frequently Asked Questions
What movies should I watch before visiting Colombia?
If you want to understand Colombia beyond the images of beaches, coffee plantations, and Bogotá, start with Colombia Magia Salvaje, Embrace of the Serpent, Birds of Passage, The Wind Journeys, The Strategy of the Snail, The Kings of the World, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Together, they introduce Colombia’s landscapes, Indigenous cultures, music, history, cities, and regional identities.
What is the best movie to watch before traveling to Colombia?
If you watch only one, I recommend Colombia Magia Salvaje. It offers an extraordinary introduction to the country’s geographic diversity, from the Andes and Caribbean to the Amazon and Pacific. It is especially useful if you are planning a multi-region trip because it gives you a sense of just how different Colombia’s landscapes can be.
What movie should I watch before visiting the Colombian Amazon?
Embrace of the Serpent is the best choice. Rather than presenting the Amazon simply as a place for wildlife and adventure, the film explores Indigenous knowledge, spirituality, memory, and the complex history of encounters between Indigenous communities and outsiders.
What movies should I watch before visiting Cartagena or the Colombian Caribbean?
Birds of Passage, The Wind Journeys, and One Hundred Years of Solitude are particularly useful. They reveal different sides of the Caribbean: Wayuu culture and La Guajira, vallenato and rural traditions, and the cultural imagination associated with Gabriel García Márquez.
What should I watch before visiting Bogotá?
The Strategy of the Snail is one of the most interesting choices. The film offers a window into Bogotá’s historic center, social contrasts, migration, and the meaning of home. It can make walking through La Candelaria more meaningful because you begin to see the neighborhood as part of a much larger urban story.
What should I watch before visiting Medellín?
The Kings of the World offers a perspective that goes beyond the familiar stories of Pablo Escobar, violence, and Medellín’s transformation. It explores land, displacement, inequality, identity, and belonging helping travelers understand some of the deeper realities behind the Colombia they encounter today.
Is it worth watching Narcos before traveling to Colombia?
Yes, but with some perspective. Narcos can provide an introduction to Colombia’s drug-trafficking history and the violence of the 1980s and 1990s, but it should not be treated as a portrait of Colombia as a whole. The country is far more diverse than the story presented by the series. That is why I recommend complementing Narcos with films that explore Colombia’s landscapes, cultures, Indigenous communities, music, and everyday life.
Can movies help me understand Colombia before traveling?
They can, but they should be treated as a starting point rather than a substitute for experiencing the country. A good film can give you historical or cultural context, help you recognize landscapes and traditions, and make you ask better questions once you arrive. The real value comes when what you see on screen begins to interact with what you experience in Colombia.
How can I better understand Colombia before visiting?
What should I know before traveling to Colombia for the first time?
Colombia is much more diverse than many first-time visitors expect. Before traveling, it helps to understand that Bogotá, the Caribbean, the Amazon, Medellín, and Colombia’s rural regions have very different landscapes, histories, cultures, and rhythms of life. One of the best ways to build that context is through films and documentaries connected to the places you are visiting. They can help you understand Colombia beyond the usual travel images and notice details you might otherwise miss once you arrive.