Dancing through Colombia

I’ve been more than once — the first time in 2011, on my own to Medellín and Bogotá. In early 2025 friends from Bogotá got married in Santa Marta, and I used that to tack three months onto the trip. Not as a holiday, but to work out what this trip should look like and to build the contacts you need for it.

I did it deliberately slowly: about two weeks per place. Santa Marta, Cartagena, Medellín, Bogotá, Cali, the Eje Cafetero. Enough time to find out where and when people dance and which schools are good, but just as much what there is to do and see beyond the dancing. Because you have to know where to be when, or you miss it.

Cali is fixed. The city calls itself the salsa capital of the world, and that’s more than a slogan — salsa is part of the city itself, and of what it means to be caleño. Nowhere in the world are there as many salsa schools, and every Friday and Saturday night people gather to dance outside in the streets of the centre.

There’s dancing almost every evening, but it’s also a round trip: the other highlights of the country, and a few days at the beach. How many days per place and in what order isn’t fixed yet — that’s what I’m working on.

Want to be there? Join the interest list and tell me when it suits you. That helps me with the planning, and you’ll be the first to know once the date and price are set.