Ciudad Perdida

Ciudad Perdida, the "Lost City", sits on a forested ridge at about 1,150 metres in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, high above the valley of the Buritaca River. The Tairona built it around AD 800, some six and a half centuries before Machu Picchu, and it was one of the largest of their mountain towns. What survives is not a city of walls but a city of platforms: about 169 terraces carved into the slope and faced with river stones, linked by stone-paved paths and stairways and opening onto small circular plazas. Wooden houses with steep thatched roofs once stood on the round stone rings, and the outlines of those rings are what give the site its unmistakable look today, a cascade of green circles stepping down the ridge through the jungle.

The way in sets the tone. The final approach is a climb of about 1,200 moss-covered stone steps through dense forest, and only at the top does the main sequence of terraces open up, with the mountains rising all around. The Tairona abandoned the town in the sixteenth century, in the upheaval that followed the Spanish conquest, and the forest closed over it.

For the outside world it was found again in 1972, when a family of treasure hunters stumbled on the stairway; looting followed until archaeologists of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology arrived in 1976 and restored the site over the following years. But it was never lost to everyone. The Kogi, descendants of the Tairona who still live in the Sierra Nevada, call the city Teyuna and say they visited it long before it was reported. For them and the other peoples of the Sierra, among them the Wiwa and Arhuaco, it remains a sacred place where purification ceremonies are held each September, and the site is managed with the participation of the indigenous communities.

There is no road to Teyuna. The only way is on foot, along a trail of about 44 km there and back that climbs and drops through forest and farmland, and crosses the Buritaca on the way. It is usually walked in four days with a guide, and arriving in the misty morning after days of mud and rivers is part of what makes the place unforgettable.

Getting there

The site lies in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, about 35 km from the town of Ciénaga as the crow flies. Simón Bolívar International Airport (SMR) at Santa Marta is about 35 km away. Guided treks start from the village of El Mamey (Machete Pelao), reached by road from Santa Marta; the walk to the city and back is about 44 km and usually takes four days.