Colombia spent much of the late 20th century defined internationally by drug trafficking violence and armed conflict, a period that peaked through the 1980s and 1990s before a prolonged, difficult peace process, culminating in a landmark 2016 agreement with the country’s largest guerrilla group, the FARC, substantially reduced the violence that had shaped daily life for generations. The transformation since has been significant enough that Colombia has become one of South America’s fastest-growing tourism destinations, a shift that would have seemed unlikely to many just a few decades earlier.
Colombia is the only South American country with coastlines on both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, a geography that has given it an unusually wide range of climates and ecosystems within a single nation, from tropical coastline to high Andean plateau to Amazon rainforest.
A Name Borrowed From an Explorer Who Never Set Foot There
Colombia takes its name from Christopher Columbus, despite the explorer never having actually visited the territory that now bears a version of his name, an honour proposed by Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda in the late 18th century as part of a broader push to create a distinctly American identity separate from Spanish colonial naming. The country’s coffee, grown extensively in the fertile volcanic soil of its central mountain regions, became a defining national export from the 19th century onward and remains deeply tied to Colombian identity today.
Colombia is considered one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth relative to its size, home to more recorded bird species than any other nation, a richness owed to its combination of coastline, mountain, and rainforest ecosystems within relatively close proximity to one another.
Painting Colombia’s Andean Colour and Light
Colombia’s colourful colonial towns set against dramatic Andean peaks give a watercolourist rich colour and striking natural scale to work with. We’ve captured that character in our own Colombia Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of South America for a wall at home.
Reshaped substantially within a single generation, Colombia remains a country whose more recent story has increasingly become one of recovery rather than the conflict that once defined its reputation abroad.