Bogotá

Civil war, paramilitary terror, narco-funded revolution and Pablo Escobar – Colombia has had them all. But our intrepid reporter Chris Moss found the capital city of Bogotá buzzing and keen to dance until dawn

Andrés Carrede restaurant

‘You can’t wind that window down,’ said the driver, seeing me struggling with the handle. ‘I think you’ll find it’s just a little bit thick.’ He thumped his knuckles on the windscreen to produce the muffled sound of bullet-proofing. ‘Welcome to life in the tropics,’ he laughed.

Arriving in a new city after a long flight is always a high. But Bogotá had a special frisson. It’s been off the tourist map for decades, given the axis of evil treatment by the travel press. Despite years living and working in Latin America, I didn’t know what to expect but had a vague notion of Shakira, blackened SUVs and heavily armed private security goons.

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Staying awake seemed the natural approach in a city that has exported so much insomnia. Flying in from London via Madrid I was already jetlagged and overdosing on the high-altitude – the city sits in a steep valley in the central spine of the Andes at 2,600 metres above sea level. When I saw the throb of the city centre I wanted to dive right in.

The old town, La Candelaria, was established in the seventeenth century, when Colombia was part of the Spanish colony of Nueva Granada. It’s long been the choice of backpackers brave enough to stray off the well-trodden trail of Quito-Cuzco-Titicaca.

Earthquakes have come and gone, but there are remnants of the original architecture, including a beautiful observatory tower, colonial chapels with interior decoration by native Indians, shambolic alleyways that look romantic at sunset but are no-go areas after dark and a few fine old café-bookstores where beans used to be traded. There are libraries everywhere. In 2007, Bogotá – once known as the Athens of South America for its high-brow attitudes to learning – will be Unesco’s Book Capital City.

La Candelaria is not a Unesco heritage town. This is good, as the city feels alive and in flux. The Central Business District is a hotchpotch of early twentieth-century attempts at grandeur – French palaces, glassed-in arcades of the Burlington variety, and random bits of modernism, deco and ’60s functionalism. The street life is similarly diverse, from bankers and brokers to emerald vendors who hustle their wares. I went over to chat but as gringos are rare in town, I was soon surrounded by every gem dealer in the city.

Out hotel was in the modern zona norte, where most office and apartment blocks have migrated in the past 20 years. The social scene round leafy Parque 93 is very smart indeed, with young, well-heeled Bogotanos heading directly from work to dimly lit cocktail bars, natty little fusion restaurants and fashion boutiques. At the Bogotá Beer Company bar – one of a small chain of microbreweries taking on the weak-lager monopolies of Aguila and Poker with strong, nutty ales – you could be in Seattle. We met our first British ex-pat there, a PhD student working on a thesis about pre-Independence history. ‘The main political factions were fighting even before Colombia was created,’ she claimed. ‘The violence is as old as the country.