Caño Cristales — river
Gicaman · CC BY-SA 4.0

Caño Cristales

  • Elevation462 m
  • 2 min read
  • 2.264° N 73.794° W

Interesting facts

  • The red that made the river famous belongs to a riverweed of the Podostemaceae family found almost nowhere outside Caño Cristales and the neighbouring Caño Siete Machos.
  • The plant was first described scientifically in 1951 under the genus name Macarenia, taken from the hills where it grows.
  • The river's five colours are usually counted as red, yellow, green, blue and black, and some Spanish sources add white as a sixth.
  • Despite its length of roughly 100 kilometres, Caño Cristales is never more than about 20 metres wide.
  • The colours do not reach the river's mouth: they fade out around La Cachivera, before Caño Cristales joins the Guayabero.
  • The Macarena hills became Colombia's first national reserve by act of Congress in 1948, and were declared a national natural park in 1971.
  • The range lies where Andean, Amazonian and Orinoco life meet, and more than 2,400 plant species have been recorded there.
  • Wider fame came after the Colombian naturalist Andrés Hurtado García explored the river in 1989 and wrote about it in the newspaper El Tiempo.

Why it is worth it

Caño Cristales is a clear, fast-flowing river in the Serranía de la Macarena, an isolated range of hills in the Meta department of central Colombia. For most of the year it looks like an ordinary highland stream running over bare rock. From roughly the end of July to November it becomes something else: the riverbed turns red, magenta, yellow and green, and the water, perfectly transparent, runs over the colour like glass. The effect has earned it the name "the river of five colours".

The colour is alive. It comes from an aquatic plant, Rhyncholacis clavigera, formerly known as Macarenia clavigera, which grows attached to the rock in fast water. Young plants are green; as they are exposed to the sun they turn yellowish and then pass through every shade of red, so a single stretch of river can show the whole sequence at once. Beneath them lies quartzite roughly 1.2 billion years old, part of a western outlier of the Guiana Shield. The current has drilled the rock with rapids, small waterfalls and round pits called giant's kettles, and the plants fill these with patches of colour like mosaics on a floor.

The river is about 100 km long and flows into the Guayabero, a tributary of the Orinoco basin. Cattle farmers came across it in 1969; by 2016 it was receiving more than 16,000 visitors a year. The surrounding hills shelter some 420 species of birds and eight species of primates. Access is managed with care: visits go only with local guides, group numbers are limited, and the river is rested from mid-December to mid-May so that the plants can regenerate.

Getting there

The gateway is the small town of La Macarena, served by La Macarena Airport (LMC) with flights from Bogotá and Villavicencio; San José del Guaviare, with its airport (SVI), is about 133 km away and not a practical route. From La Macarena the river is reached by a short boat trip on the Guayabero, a jeep ride and a walk of about half an hour.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Colombia 11The Most Beautiful Rivers 13The Most Beautiful Water Wonders 429

From the encyclopaedia

The Caño Cristales is a river located in the Serranía de la Macarena, an isolated mountain range in Meta Department, Colombia. It is a tributary of the Guayabero River, itself a part of the Orinoco basin. Caño Cristales was found in 1969 by a group of cattle farmers. The river is commonly called the "River of Five Colors" or the "Liquid Rainbow," and is noted for its striking colors. The bed of the river from the end of July through November is variously colored yellow, green, blue, black, and especially red, the last caused by Rhyncholacis clavigera plants on the riverbed. In recent years, the river has become a tourist destination; there were more than 16,000 visitors in 2016.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

2.26417, -73.79444per Wikidata